


Empty Spaces

by ChessPieceFace



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Continuation, Concerningly Long Chapters, Consequences, F/F, F/M, Gen, Lots of Original Characters - Freeform, M/M, Moving On, Multi, One-Sided Will Byers/Mike Wheeler, Overcomplicated Plotting, Overuse of semicolons, Philosophy, Politics, Post-Season/Series 03, The Party (Extended), season 4
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-11
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:27:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 225,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24667591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChessPieceFace/pseuds/ChessPieceFace
Summary: The ash has settled from Starcourt, and the tragedies of the summer.Now, as the governments and powers of the world manoeuvre against one another, the splintered Party and their friends and families must repair their broken relationships, whilst grieving their losses and trying to build new lives. But the boundaries between life and death are not exactly as clear-cut as they might appear, and new enemies are emerging on all sides. One way or another, things are going to end this time.And then, of course, beneath all this, the spectre of the Upside-Down remains. It's not going away.
Relationships: Dustin Henderson & Lucas Sinclair, Dustin Henderson & Mike Wheeler, Dustin Henderson/Suzie, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Jonathan Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Jonathan Byers & Will Byers, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper, Maxine "Max" Mayfield & Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield/Lucas Sinclair, Mike Wheeler & Nancy Wheeler, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley/Original Female Character(s), Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane & Dustin Henderson & Maxine Mayfield & Lucas Sinclair & Mike Wheeler, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Will Byers & Mike Wheeler, Will Byers/Mike Wheeler, Will Byers/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 186
Kudos: 119





	1. The Show Must Go On

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone, and thank you for reading this far! This is my first attempt at fanfiction (after a good few years spent reading and vaguely planning), and, rather than taking things slowly and writing something short and manageable, I have decided to throw myself in very much at the deep end. This story is an attempt to show what might happen next after the end of Series 3 (although I suspect that the actual version will be significantly better and more streamlined) - it's not yet complete, and I'm unsure exactly how often I'll be able to update it, but I'll certainly do my best! 
> 
> I also feel that it would be only fair to mention a few of the other stories on this site which have inspired me to try and write something even half as entertaining - if this is the sort of story that you enjoy, then please do check out 'In A Strange Land' by MrsEvadneCake (possibly the single greatest piece of Stranger Things fanfiction out there, set before the start of Series 3); 'When She Was Special' and 'When He Was Special' by Constantius (two stories set post-Series 3, which have got the voices of each character absolutely spot-on); 'Emotion Sickness' by Shypt (my favourite post-Series 3 continuation, with the perfect balance of character work and plot); and 'Long Live The Kings' by me_4eva (an alternate universe diverging during Series 3, with one of the most spectacularly complex and intricately well-plotted stories). I highly doubt I'll be able to produce something on that level, but let's see how it goes...
> 
> I do hope you all enjoy this story - please do leave reviews and comments, so that I can improve my writing and see what everyone thinks!

_****_

_**PART ONE: THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE** _

The day after the world failed to end again, the three of them went out for ice cream.  


It was a rather desultory affair, orders of magnitude quieter than any normal Party meeting. Then again, of course, they were not meeting in order to have a good time. They were meeting out of necessity, because you can’t go through something like _that_ , and then just go home and do nothing for the rest of the week.  


They had found a bench in the park to sit, surrounded by half-deconstructed fairground equipment and only slightly in the shade of early evening. It had almost been a communal decision to meet; Mike had slept for a grand total of two hours last night after arriving home at god-knows-when, and by midday, was deeply on edge, subconsciously picking over the fact that everyone else was somewhere else, and could be in any kind of real or imagined danger. Over lunch, he and Nancy had deflected and evaded their parents’ questions about Starcourt – it was almost second nature by this point, and the two had become extremely good at running with one another’s stories – but he doubted that the anxiety in his voice, or the frantic movements of Nancy’s eyes around the table, had gone unnoticed. So, when the Supercom had spluttered into life late in the afternoon, and Dustin’s voice had emanated from it, asking with a touch of desperation whether anyone was around, Mike had jumped at the opportunity, and had left.  


It was only the three of them, of course. Lucas had told them that Max wasn’t being allowed out, and that she didn’t seem particularly inclined to see anyone anyway. When they had gone over to the Byers house, a dishevelled Jonathan had eventually opened the door, and let the three of them know that everyone was fine, but in bed after a long night of fitful sleep. So they had gone to the park where the Independence Day celebrations had been held, where they swapped stories and pieced together exactly what had happened.  


“Another gate?” Lucas asked Dustin, who was trying to explain his journey around the secret Soviet base (and how on earth had that happened? How had they missed a communist infiltration, whilst they were busy chasing lifeguards?). “Or was it the same one, but they reopened it?”  


“Different,” said Dustin, nodding knowingly, “but in the same place. The tunnels stretched all the way to the Lab, I think.”  


“So what made it different?” asked Mike, who truthfully did not care, but needed to stave off the silence. When they fell silent, then they would all start thinking, and nobody wanted that.  


“It didn’t look the same as El described the last one,” Dustin replied, shoving the last fragments of the ice-cream cone into his mouth. “And it certainly didn’t have the Mind Flayer coming through it or anything like that; there must have been other openings of some kind.”  


“The flesh thing didn’t come through,” Mike pointed out. “It was made here, somehow. Nancy told me about the people being melted down.”  


“Well,” said Dustin, thoughtfully, “the mind of the Mind Flayer didn’t come through into the Russian base, otherwise it would have possessed all of them instead.” He stopped, and looked at a point behind Lucas’s back. “Lucas. Turn around.”  


“Look at what you see?” replied Lucas, the ghost of a smile on his face. Dustin displayed his middle finger with relish, and Lucas turned to see his parents striding across the park towards them, Erica in tow.  


“Time to head home, Lucas,” said Mr Sinclair. “All finished up at work.”  


“Can I stay here with the other two?” asked Lucas hopefully, but all of them knew what the answer would be before he’d finished speaking. Mrs Sinclair shook her head in confirmation.  


“Let’s just be on the safe side, shall we?” said Mr Sinclair, and looked curiously at Dustin as the curly-haired boy stifled a strange, humourless, laugh.  


“Sorry,” explained Dustin. “Cramp. In the airway.”  


It was perhaps a measure of how much the Sinclairs wished to return home as soon as possible that nobody – not even Erica, who was standing back and fiddling with the collar on her shirt – said anything in response to this, but merely began walking towards the car. Lucas shrugged, defeated, and stood to follow them.  


“See you guys tomorrow, I guess,” he said. “Or whenever.”  


“You’ll let us know when you get back?” said Mike. “Talk on the Supercom this evening?”  


“Alright, mom,” Lucas replied jokingly, but his face fell when he looked at Mike. “Yeah,” he said, quieter this time. “I’ll let you know.”  


And then it was just the two of them, sitting on a park bench on the field of victory, as the Sinclairs drove off.  


“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” said Dustin eventually, into the silence. “I wish I’d been there to help you with everything.”  


Mike shook his head emphatically. “Don’t apologise, Dustin. You had your own thing; you had Russians and Steve and secret radio messages.” He paused. “I’m sorry we weren’t there for you with that.”  


Dustin said nothing, staring a long way into the distance. Absently, he pulled his cap down slightly to shade his eyes from the setting sun.  


“We were just so…distracted, you know?” Mike continued. “I was wrapped up in my own thing with El, and then we fought, and then I hurt Will without even meaning to, and then we locked Billy in a sauna and got beaten up and all the rest of it, and it was almost like I didn’t notice that you weren’t there. Almost like you might still have been in Utah.”  


“The camp wasn’t even in Utah,” Dustin pointed out. “It was Colorado, I think. But yeah. I know.”  


The two of them sat in silence for a few more minutes.  


“I’m sorry,” Mike said again. “Remember when the Party faced all of this stuff together?”  


Dustin cracked a grin. “Good times. All those fond memories.” He paused in rumination. “Maybe next time.”  


“What?” said Mike, horrified.  


“Come on,” said Dustin, and Mike found a moment to be slightly irritated how his friend could say anything in a tone of cheerful reason, even the suggestion that another apocalypse was already on its way. “You don’t think this is over, do you? You don’t think we’re just going to be let off the hook now?”  


“I mean…”  


“I don’t want it to either,” Dustin continued, “but I’m not exactly going to be surprised when it does. At least we’re ready now.”  


“Like that’d help,” Mike muttered. “We barely made it this time. El almost died, and lost her powers on top of that. Steve collapsed, like, two minutes after they closed the Gate. Hopper…” He trailed off.  


Dustin took off his hat solemnly, and squinted as a mark of respect.  


“I still can’t quite believe it,” he said, after a few seconds. “That Hopper’s gone. I keep remembering, and it’s like – you remember that time we made a circuit with Mr Clarke, and it turned out that I was part of the circuit, and I got zapped? That’s what it’s like, remembering, like a little shock every now and then, and then I feel scared, and then I feel sad, and then I feel a whole lot of things all at once.” He paused, and returned the hat to his head, bowing to necessity. “I just keep thinking about the last conversation I had with him, before all of this happened. It was before I went off to camp, and I was in the drugstore and bumped into him, and we both said hi to each other. And then do you know what I said?”  


“Obviously not, Dustin,” said Mike.  


“I said, “Do you know if turtles can take aspirin?” Because I was putting together a list of instructions so that Mom would know how to take care of Yertle when I was away, and I couldn’t remember what it said in the book, and I just blurted it out because he was there and I was thinking it. And he rolled his eyes at me, and said, “Kid, I neither know nor care,” – weirdly poetic, that – and then he bought whatever it was he was buying, and left. And then I never spoke to him again, apart from something in the heat of battle in the mall, maybe, and now I can’t.”  


Mike said nothing. He knew that Dustin would prefer him not to; would prefer him to pretend that he hadn’t heard the slight catch in his voice, the way his words had sped up and tripped over themselves in the last few sentences. Dustin took a deep breath, and looked gratefully at Mike, and then said, “Do you remember the last thing you said to him? Not counting in the mall?”  


Mike bit his lip slightly, and his hands stopped moving. “Yeah,” he eventually admitted, after a long moment had hung in the air and fallen. “Yeah, I remember.”  


But he didn’t say anything else on the matter.

***********  


Two weeks after it all happened, Nancy Wheeler took the family’s car at four o’clock in the morning and drove, wandering her way around the empty streets of Hawkins as the first glimmerings of light appeared in the sky, and then making her way out (without entirely realising that she was doing that) towards the great wreck of Starcourt. It was only when she reached the barriers blocking the road that it dawned on her where she had made it to, so she parked on the roadside and got out, staring over the government-branded roadblocks at the building which was halfway through a process of official demolition, finishing the job that the Mind Flayer had started.  


She watched Starcourt for a while. Nothing was happening, of course – Owens and his men weren’t exactly being driven by any sense of urgency any more, and so were working a solid nine-to-five on the whole enterprise – but still she surveyed it with a dispassionate interest, like some five-foot-tall Napoleon on the field of Borodino. Then, after some time had passed – she had no idea how much – an idea came to her, and she was leaping back into the car and driving it faster than she strictly needed to, over to the Byers house.  


Jonathan was still asleep, but she had worked out a few months ago how to open his window from the outside. He woke with a start at the sound of her landing on the floor, and instinctively grabbed at the alarm clock next to his bed, brandishing it as a weapon until he realised who it was.  


“Nancy,” he said, his tone dull. “It’s –“ he checked the alarm clock – “quarter past five in the morning. What’s going on?”  


“Sorry,” she said, as she moved the blankets aside so that she could lie in the bed next to him. “But I had a thought.”  


Jonathan sighed. “Let’s hear it. Then can I go back to sleep?”  


“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not.”  


Jonathan rolled over to face her, and made a show of prising his eyes open.  


“Mayor Kline was in league with the Russians,” she continued. “He was definitely taking money from them for Starcourt, clearing all of the red tape out of their way and turning a blind eye to anything he heard. But he’s a small-town mayor.”  


“Was,” corrected Jonathan. “The impeachment vote went through today. What’s your point?”  


“My point is,” Nancy said, “that he couldn’t have brought the Russians here; he didn’t know anything about the Gate or anything like that, so he couldn’t have invited them. How did the Russians know to come to Hawkins?”  


“Does it matter?” asked Jonathan. “They did, and then they all got exploded. End of story.”  


“No,” she said. “Start of one. We need to investigate.”  


Jonathan rolled his eyes.  


“And there’s something else, too,” she said. “Owens isn’t telling us everything. I spoke to him afterwards, and there’s a lot he isn’t saying. Like, how was he ready to come here with a small army that quickly? What are they doing to the site? Did they know that something else would happen? What –“  


Jonathan cut her off. “Nancy,” he said. “Listen. You can’t keep investigating. It’s all finished, for now. You need to rest, to recover. You need to not be going on weird night-time drives every night. Your parents are going to notice, you know.”  


“No, they won’t,” replied Nancy with an ironclad certainty. “As long as I’m home by half past six in the morning, they don’t notice a thing. Even that’s probably playing it safe. Do you know, they don’t even ask Mike where he’s going any more, when he goes out with his friends, only two weeks after all that?”  


Jonathan shook his head. “You know what I mean. We’ve got to go back to normal. We can’t keep fighting the good fight for the rest of our lives; we’ve got to just. You know. Be ourselves again.”  


“You know I can’t not fight them,” said Nancy. “You don’t want us to be normal.”  


“No,” Jonathan agreed. “Course not. But I don’t want us to keep chasing monsters and Russians for every single day of the rest of our lives. I want to…”  


He trailed off, and they lay together in a silence that was not particularly awkward.  


“We were lucky,” Jonathan whispered, after a few minutes had passed. “We survived. Our families survived. Mike and Will. Mom. They were all so close to being killed there in that mall.”  


“I know,” Nancy said. “I know. But it’ll all come back again, one day.”  


Jonathan nodded in agreement. “So let’s live, whilst we still can.”  


Nancy shifted into a more comfortable position in the bed, and said to the ceiling, “I just want to be prepared next time. Next time, we’re going to win.”  


They said nothing for the next hour or so, drifting comfortably in and out of sleep in each other’s arms, until Nancy let out a slight yelp upon realising the time, and scrambled out of the window with a breathtaking lack of elegance, before driving home and climbing back into her own room again.

***********

A month after everything, El Hopper sat in the darkness of her room in the Byers house and punched herself in the nose a few times, until Max grabbed her hand and told her to stop.  


“It doesn’t work like that, I told you,” Max said. “The nosebleeds are caused by the powers, not the other way round.”  


El rolled her eyes slightly, although it was too dark for Max to see this. “I know,” she said. “Nothing else has worked.”  


Max’s tone softened. “They’ll come back eventually. You’re just still burnt out.”  


“Mike says so too.”  


“Well, even a broken clock is right twice a day,” said Max.  


“Broken clocks?”  


“Never mind.”  


Eventually, Max stood up and opened the heavy curtains, letting the bright daylight spill into the room. “Billy’s funeral is on Tuesday,” she said, conversationally. “We made it to the top of the waiting list.”  


El stared up at her friend. “Should I come?”  


Max turned away, scratching at her shoulder. “Sure. If you want.”  


“Do you want?”  


Max nodded, eventually. “It’ll be good to have a friend there.”  


“No Lucas?” said El, confused. She was fairly sure that the pair had not broken up again recently, but it was always a possibility.  


“I told him he can’t,” said Max, just a hint of bitterness creeping into her tone. “I had to, for his own good. If Neil sees us together…”  


“Neil doesn’t like Lucas?”  


“Neil doesn’t like anyone who isn’t white enough to get into a Nazi rally,” Max said. “And he’ll be worse than normal at the funeral.”  


But he wasn’t, as it turned out. He stood there throughout the service, Max and El nervously glancing at him out of the corners of their eyes occasionally, as still as a statue. When the few other attendees – Mike’s mother, curiously, among them – came to offer their condolences, he remained motionless, giving strained and clipped thanks to each person in tone, and once they were all gone, he turned on his heel with a military precision and marched off back to his car.  


Max and El stayed around there for a few hours afterwards, lying on the warm and freshly-cut grass beneath the memorial stone to Jim Hopper, and they quietly wept together into the undisturbed earth that wasn’t even a grave.

***********

Around six weeks after their communal torture and mutual confessions, Steve sat Robin down and explained everything to her in order from the disappearing of Will Byers, through to the present day. That was the plan, at least; as it turned out, Steve Harrington was either a brilliant or a terrible storyteller, getting distracted by tangents and musings and strange asides every few sentences. The tale began at around ten in the evening over a bottle of white wine in Steve’s sprawling, empty house, and by midnight (and by bottle number three), Robin was still no clearer on several of the salient points of the narrative than she had been when they had started.  


“Steve,” she tried again. “Dingus. How did you all get to the tunnels if you’d been hit with a plate so hard it knocked you out?”  


Steve threw an exasperated glance over his shoulder as he put the finishing touches to the drawing he had been working on with a fountain pen and the back of a receipt, which was supposed to illustrate what a demodog looked like, and instead looked like someone had fed a windmill to a ferret. “Max drove, I think. That’s what they said afterwards, anyway. I was basically out of it at that point.”  


“Also,” Robin continued, showing no sign that she had heard him and downing her glass of wine. “Also, also, why did the government want to get the Mind Player out?”  


“Flayer,” said Steve. “It’s called the Mine Flayer. Because it lives in the tunnels.”  


Robin threw a cushion at him, causing the demodog to abruptly develop a long scar across its back.  


“Dunno,” Steve answered, after considering the question for a few minutes. “I think they wanted energy, or something?”  


“What?”  


“It’s what Dustin said afterwards. Department of Energy.”  


“That doesn’t make any sense. Are they building a power station in the Upside-Down?”  


“Maybe they are.”  


A comfortable silence descended on the room. Steve lay down on the carpeted floor, letting his eyes drift shut.  


“Steve,” said Robin again, more softly this time. “The nightmares. Do they stop?”  


“Not really,” he replied. “But it’s fine. You get used to them. Sometimes you even start to win in them.”

***********

Two months after she had killed the man she might have loved, Joyce Byers gathered her three children into the living room and told them that she was taking them away from their friends and loved ones.  


After she said the words, nobody said anything for quite some time. Then, as if all had been working to the same internal clock, all three began to talk at once.  


“Where are we going?” asked Jonathan, ever the practical one.  


“How long until we go?” asked El, breaking a silence she had held for almost two days now.  


Will just looked at her, and said, so quietly she almost didn’t hear him, “Why?”  


Joyce sipped on the glass of water she had brought to the table with her, so that she could collect herself for a moment. “We’re leaving in around a month’s time, El, darling. Gives us enough time to sort everything out here, and that way you won’t miss too much school. Jonathan –” she turned to him – “we’re going to a town called Winterton, in Virginia, down near the coast. You’ll like it; my cousins used to live near there, and they told me that the sun on the bay in the morning is beautiful to photograph.”  


“Virginia,” said Jonathan, as though half-stunned. “Huh. I assumed it would be Maine.”  


“Why?”  


“Don’t know. Just assumed. Didn’t Bob want to go there?”  


Joyce nodded. “That’s why not. Too many memories there, even though I’ve never been.” Then she realised something. “Wait, what do you mean, you assumed?”  


Jonathan said nothing, but Joyce knew that he must have guessed this a long time ago, must have known that they would be leaving – perhaps even before she did.  


“And Will,” she said, turning to the young man who was staring at the wall with a strange serene intensity. “I wish I could explain why in just a few words.”  


_I need to keep you all safe, and I can’t do it here. I need to get out of here before all of Hawkins is swallowed up by the Upside-Down. I need to go somewhere without all of these ghosts and memories, all piled up in crazy-paving down every street. I need to stop losing people. I need to stop losing myself._  


“I guess I just think we need to go,” she said. “And I’m sorry, I truly am. But Hawkins isn’t a place for us any more. Maybe it never really was.”

***********

Three months after his life had been torn apart with a gleeful malice for the third time in as many years, Will Byers stood on the street, a fully-laden car at his back and his friends at his front. None of them were crying, and nor was he, and that was the story they would all stick to if anyone asked.  


Dustin was the first one to pull him into a hug, the boy’s limbs flailing wildly before they captured Will. “We’ll miss you, man,” he said. “I mean, obviously. Now there’s no chance of any D&D until Thanksgiving, at least.”  


“If we can make it here,” muttered Will.  


“Well, we’re definitely coming to see you at Christmas,” Dustin said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Steve can drive us if all else fails. Or Nancy, I guess.”  


They broke apart. Dustin looked Will in the eye, and Will looked back through the mask of joviality that his friend had applied thickly to himself that morning.  


“Don’t forget about us, Will,” he said. “I mean, obviously, go ahead and make new friends and stuff. I don’t think you’ll be able to forget Hawkins even if you wanted to.” He winced slightly as Lucas elbowed him in the ribs. “But don’t forget that we’ll be here for you.”  


Lucas was next to hug him, a short but firm embrace. “See you soon, Byers,” he said, his voice deeper than normal. “You’d better spend all of your mom’s phone bill on calling us.”  


“If El and Jonathan leave him anything,” said Max, stepping up and hugging Will as well. “Have a good time down by the sea, man. Send us drawings of it.”  


And then it was just Mike left, and in a strange way, the awkwardness that had flickered around them since that night in the rain – and maybe before then – simply cut out immediately and without fanfare, as Mike marched up and pulled his friend into a deep hug.  


“I wish you were staying,” Mike muttered over Will’s shoulder. “It’ll be so weird without you.”  


“You probably won’t notice,” said Will, who hadn’t meant it to sound that bitter.  


Mike was silent, then quietly said, “I will. A lot.”  


It felt like he was straining to say something else as well, but Will knew that it would not be the thing he wanted Mike to say, so he contented himself with holding onto his oldest friend for one last time before however many months.  


And then it was time to go. Jonathan whispered something in Nancy’s ear, and she smiled a rueful smile through her tears, and punched him gently on the arm before kissing him. El had said goodbye to everyone, exchanging a long embrace with Max and a kind of faux-cheerfulness with Dustin and Lucas. Finally, she had looked at Mike in the way that only those two seemed to be able to look at each other, and she had nodded at him with the faintest hint of a smile, and he had nodded back in the same way, and Will, watching, knew that whatever they had spoken about in their last private goodbye, they were both in agreement about whatever it was, and he somehow wasn’t jealous or irritated like he normally was. And then they climbed into the cars, and Will waved a final goodbye to his friends, his town, his old life, before they headed off into the rest of the wide world.

***********

An indeterminate amount of time _afterwards_ , in a place that was at once further away from Hawkins than the dimmest stars in the night sky and yet closer than the other side of a shadow, a dead man opened his eyes in the dark.


	2. Ordinary World

**Monday 30th September, 1985:**  


The strangest thing was the silence, Lucas decided around lunchtime on the first day after the departure of their friends. It wasn’t as if Will was generally the most talkative member of the group; indeed, it wouldn’t necessarily have been tremendously surprising had he been sitting there with them and not uttered a word all day, since that had been known to happen (generally as a result of either illness, recovery from torture, or Dustin being inordinately excited about something and not letting anyone else get a word in edgeways). But the times when he would have spoken, the gaps which he would have been the one to fill with a wry comment or a muttered defence of something, now they showed up, and everyone noticed them. And then that caused the silences to propagate and spread, and by lunchtime, Mike was virtually bouncing off the ceiling with a strange jittery nervousness, and Max had yelled at Dustin twice already.  


It was not as if starting high school had been particularly easy in any case. A lot of what had made the previous year of school so fun – Mr Clarke’s science lessons, the absence of Troy, the indescribable joy that comes from having your friends no longer in mourning or battling possession – had very much melted away in the first days of September. Troy had apparently been overjoyed to see his old victims back, to no longer be at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and had celebrated with a hundred petty malices and an entire carton of milk poured into Lucas’s shoes. But this was even worse, in a way.  


Feeling Dustin poking him in the side, Lucas reluctantly dragged himself out of introspection.  


“What,” he stated.  


“Nobody listens to me,” Dustin complained. “I was saying, do you want to play D&D this weekend? Try and get something new going, the four of us?”  


“And I was saying,” said Max, through gritted teeth, “that I would rather you inserted a safety pin into my eyeball. So drop it, Moonchild.”  


“And I was saying that I don’t have a campaign ready –“ began Mike quietly, but was cut off by Dustin.  


“First of all,” he said, leaning over the table and addressing Max, “the Childlike Empress was an extremely powerful and wise ruler, so I thank you. Secondly, come on; can’t you at least give it a go?”  


Max pretended to consider, and then shook her head emphatically. “I see enough of you here at school. I’m not joining your weird dragon cult as well. Go ahead and play it without me.”  


“Seriously?” said Dustin. “You’d just rather sit at home and do nothing? It’s not like you have to worry about Billy getting mad any more…”  


He trailed off, realising what he had said, but it was too late, as Max’s face went from the irritated red it had been to a pale white that Lucas was not sure he had seen before. She stood up with an eerie calmness, staring directly into Dustin’s shocked eyes, before spinning elegantly on her heel and striding out of the canteen. Lucas started to rise from his chair, but – without breaking her stride – she pointed a finger at him, said “No,” in a dead tone, and left.  


There was a brief and shocked silence, and then Mike and Dustin began to yell at one another: the former asking how Dustin could have been so thoughtless and callous, and the latter apologising at a great volume and defending his actions. Lucas stood motionless for a few seconds, before slamming his hands down on the table; both fell silent.  


“Shut the hell up, both of you,” he said. “Mike, Dustin obviously didn’t mean it; he’s just an idiot. Dustin, I don’t know why you think Mike is the one to apologise to.” Dustin nodded and began to rise, but Lucas caught his collar and dragged him back down to a sitting position. “And not now. If you try and apologise now, she’ll probably break your nose. Leave this to me.”  


He found her out amongst the parked cars outside the school, sitting on the tarmac in an empty spot.  


“I said no,” she said, in a somewhat weak tone.  


“I know,” Lucas agreed. “But here I am. Doesn’t count as stalking if I make my presence known.”  


Her lips twitched, but only by a couple of millimetres.  


“You OK?” asked Lucas, who had not had a plan for what he would say when he found her.  


Max turned to him with a look of anger and opened her mouth, then closed it again and turned away, penitent. “Not really, I guess. But never mind.”  


“I do mind,” Lucas replied. “It’s my job to mind.”  


She said nothing.  


“You miss him?”  


“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t, surely. That would be ridiculous.”  


Lucas remained silent, but sat down next to her, leaning his back on the parked car to her side.  


“I mean,” she continued, “it’s not like he was worth missing. He wasn’t a nice guy, you know that. He broke my stuff, and he got mad at me constantly, and he made me get mad at everyone else around me.” As she spoke, the words began to tumble out faster and faster, as though they had been waiting to be released for quite some time. “He once threatened to run you idiots over in his car because I wouldn’t tell him something. He hit Steve with a plate and sent him to the hospital for stitches and concussion. He beat up someone I knew back in California because he thought they were talking back to him. He was a horrible, shitty person for a long time before the Mind Flayer got him.”  


Lucas wrapped his arm around her shoulders, as she finally gave up on holding back the tears.  


“Sometimes I wished…I wished that he was dead. Or far away from here, where I’d never have to see him again. And now I got my wish, I guess.” She took a deep breath, which rattled strangely around her streaming nose.  


All Lucas could say was, “I know, I know.”  


“But, you know, he didn’t deserve this,” she said. “He died, and it was so fucking pointless. He died, and now here I am, and I have to keep going on like this, and he just – he just, shouldn’t be dead, shouldn’t be dead…”  


She leaned into Lucas’s arms and sobbed, the crying of someone who didn’t care about being overheard or witnessed, and Lucas stroked her hair, and whispered meaningless comforts and desperate reassurances to her. Around them, the autumn winds picked up and danced in a collection of spiralling shapes, carrying fallen leaves high into the air and far across the grey parking lot, silent and deserted apart from a boy and a girl sitting on the cold ground in the centre of it all.  


***********  


**Tuesday 8th October, 1985:**  


Winterton was only the third settlement El had visited in her life, after Hawkins and Chicago, and it was nothing like either of them. For one thing, it was quiet in a way that Hawkins had never been (and that Chicago was a world away from); quiet like it was always the early hours of a midsummer morning and nobody was awake yet. For another, there was the sea, which was nothing like what she had imagined. It turned out that Lucas’s description (“like a lake, but you can’t see the other side”) had been disappointingly pedestrian; Mike’s (a series of rather poetically-worded summaries, including one actual poem, as well as a number of interesting facts expressed in numbers about how large it was) was a little bit too abstract and confusing; and Max’s (a somewhat laconic description of how looking out over the waves actually felt, delivered as though she were somewhat embarrassed by it) maybe half-true, she supposed, but still somehow incomplete.  


She had been to see the sea several times since they arrived after a solid day of driving and the restless sleep that followed it: Jonathan, and to a lesser extent Will, had been helping to set up the new house and to furnish it with all of the things they had brought with them from Hawkins, but she did not feel particularly needed in this, so had slipped away. It was not a long walk from their new house to a place where she could see the waves in the bay, and Joyce had told her that they didn’t need to be worried about anyone seeing her here, so that was where she had ended up going, again and again. There was a forest nearby, which she liked, since it reminded her of the one around the cabin. Maybe Winterton could seem like home as well.  


But there was no opportunity to see the sea today, because she had to go to school for the first time – to finally discover this mysterious place that her friends had been describing to her for the last year or so, the place for which Mike and Dustin and Jonathan and Hopper (and that still hurt, so she stopped thinking about him again) had been painstakingly preparing her with personal lessons in numbers and words and the things that Dustin had decided that everyone Ought To Know. A small part of El, which would not have been able to entirely put itself into words, was oddly glad that she had spent the last month worrying about the move and above leaving everyone behind, rather than about school. But here it was. She ate her breakfast that morning with a mechanical stoicism, downing syrup-drenched Eggo after Eggo (for Joyce knew her audience) whilst Will sprinted around the house in search of various miscellaneous items and Jonathan conducted a long argument from the dignity of his bed with his mother, centring around the appropriate time to be getting out of said bed. And then it was time to go, and she could not even find anything else to distract her as she accepted Joyce’s hugs and well-wishes, and climbed into the back seat of Jonathan’s car.  


“Excited?” Jonathan asked her and Will, with a strange twist to the corner of his mouth (and she knew this one; it was called ‘irony’, and Lucas had taught her that). “Looking forward to filling your brains with knowledge?”  


She bit her lip and said nothing, and it seemed that Will, in the front, was doing something similar, for Jonathan let out a slight snort of amusement.  


“It’s not too bad, you know,” he said. “It’s, what, six or seven hours. Easy to get through if you just keep your head down.”  


“Keep my head down?” said El, honestly confused.  


“It’s another expression,” said Will, twisting round in the seat to look in her general direction. “It means to stay out of people’s way. To not be noticed.”  


“Do you want to not be noticed?” she asked.  


Will’s eyes flickered from side to side. “I guess so. But also maybe not?”  


She said nothing, and nor did Jonathan, who was staring at the street names with an intense concentration as he tried to navigate.  


“I mean,” said Will, “it wouldn’t be too bad if I found some people to be friends with, you know. Just until we see the others again.”  


And then they had arrived, and the noises, and the crowds, were almost overwhelming after so long in the quiet, just her and the Byers house and the sea. Will jumped out of the car and began to walk, before catching himself and waiting for her.  


“Are you OK?” he asked quietly, apparently having noticed the hesitation in her eyes. El nodded, but it did not seem particularly convincing to her, and Will interpreted it as such.  


“We’ll be alright,” he murmured, and it seemed like he was reassuring himself as much as her. “I’ll hang out with you at lunch, if you like, so you don’t have to sit by yourself.”  


“Thank you,” she replied, just as quietly.  


“You’ll be fine in class,” he continued. “With all the teaching you got from everyone, you’ll probably know more than most people here.” She smiled slightly. “What lesson do you have first?”  


El checked the piece of paper she had been given the previous day, from when Joyce had taken them to meet the principal and had given something in the region of an explanation about their circumstances. Alternate dimensions had not been mentioned.  


“Geography,” she said. “And then mathematics.”  


“You can call it math,” said Will. “And then Spanish third; I’m in that class as well, I think, so I can sit next to you. For the other classes, sit on the second row from the front, like Max said.”  


“Safest,” she agreed. And then a bell rang, and they parted, with Jonathan guiding El to her classroom (and explaining how the numbers on each room were laid out so that she could find the others). She followed Max’s instructions in choosing a seat, and removed her pad of paper from her bag. When she looked up again, there was a girl sitting next to her, with pen on her cheek and hair around the same colour as hers.  


“Hi!” said the other girl. “What’s your name?”  


“El,” said El. Joyce had offered her the choice of Jane, but she had turned it down; she liked to be reminded of what her friends called her. “What’s yours?”  


“Maria,” the girl replied. “Maria Glenny. You’re new, right? In town?”  


“Yes,” El said. Then, remembering how Dustin had told her that it was best to say several things rather than just single words, she added, “My family came here last week. From Indiana.”  


“Cool,” said Maria, stating it as though this was an incontestable and empirical fact. “How many of you are there in your family?”  


“My mom, and my brother Jonathan, and my brother Will,” she said. _And nobody else._ “Will and I are non-identical twins.”  


Maria nodded in an impressed appreciation. “Not bad. I don’t have any siblings. Just four cats and a lorikeet.”  


El did not ask what a lorikeet was, in case it was common knowledge. “Which group are you in?” she asked instead.  


Maria looked confused. “What do you mean?”  


In El’s mind, this had been a perfectly normal question to ask; Max and Lucas had both taught her about the different groups you got in schools, about the cool ones and the horrible ones and the sports ones and the music ones (and, she supposed, the D&D/monster-fighting ones). She tried again.  


“Which people are your friends?”  


Maria’s eyes widened in a slow comprehension, and she let out a slight, startled chuckle. “Oh, like cliques? Not really any of them, I don’t think. Most of the others don’t talk to me that much, or let me join their groups. It’s alright, though. They don’t mind me that much.”  


El understood, and she remembered something that Mike had taught her. The first thing, as it happened.  


She stuck her hand out towards the other girl. “Would you like to be friends?”  


***********  


**Saturday 26th October, 1985:**  


Robin’s head hurt, and Steve was doing precisely nothing to help matters, stacking tapes onto the shelves with a weird sort of zeal and humming something utterly unidentifiable. Occasionally he would ask Robin a question about a film, and she would answer it. They had been doing this for approximately three hours.  


She saw his mouth open again, clearly ready to launch another stupid question, and she pre-empted him, saying, “Don’t. Whatever you’re about to ask about Jaws, don’t.”  


“How did you know?” he said.  


“I know everything,” she replied.  


“I was going to ask if they used a real shark,” Steve offered, craning his neck to look round at her, but his expression changed abruptly when he saw her face, registered how pale it was. Putting the tape in his hand on a seemingly random shelf, he crossed the floor of the shop to the counter where she was sitting. “What’s wrong?”  


“Not much,” she said. “Headache. And ennui.”  


Steve’s eyebrows furrowed.  


“It means boredom,” she clarified. “But, you know, more so.”  


“Bored with what?” asked Steve.  


Robin gestured grandly around the shop. “Less than four months ago, we stopped communists from blowing up the world with an evil flesh demon. I learned of the existence of other dimensions, telepathic powers, and Steve Harrington’s good side. I was drugged and tortured, before being involved in a bizarrely-soundtracked car chase around my hometown. And now, I am working in a video store.”  


“You preferred the flesh demons?” said Steve, pulling out another chair and sitting on it.  


Robin shrugged. “At least they didn’t keep asking me stupid questions about films they’d never seen.”  


Steve tilted his head, acknowledging a point well made.  


“It’s just weird, to go back to this,” she continued. “After all that. Feels like we shouldn’t be allowed to just do normal things any more.”  


Steve nodded. “But, you know, you sort of have to. Not like we can tell anyone else about this. You know, eventually, you sort of get used to it, in a weird way. It’s just like a crazy thing you did last summer.”  


“And that you did twice before that,” Robin noted, but agreed. “Still, though. No wonder Nancy’s going crazy.”  


“Wait, what?”  


“She came in here last week,” said Robin. “When you were being all pathetic and sick. She was complaining about the soldiers all leaving, and that nobody would answer any of her questions. She also got barred from the police station, apparently. She kept trying to get in to see the Mayor, before they took him away to prison or wherever.”  


“So you accept that she’s not a priss any more?” asked Steve, with a slight grin.  


Robin poked him in the neck with a pencil. “I guess she’s interesting. Maybe –“  


She was interrupted by the sound of the door opening and closing, and subsequently by the much louder sound of Dustin’s voice, greeting Steve with a strained enthusiasm.  


“What’s going on, kiddo?” she said to Dustin, as he wandered over to the desk.  


“Not what you call me,” he pointed out. “And nothing.”  


“Not hanging out with your friends?” she asked. “You know, the ones who are your own age?”  


Dustin adjusted his cap. It was still the one from his summer camp, and was beginning to look a bit worn. “Nope. Mike’s gone up to Weathertop, calling Virginia.”  


“Wait, who’s Virginia?” asked Steve, sounding confused.  


Robin rolled her eyes. “The state, you absolute moron. Where El lives. Remember that bit?”  


Steve scowled, and returned to pretending to stack the shelves.  


“There’s two others of you as well as him,” Robin noted to Dustin, who had produced an apple from somewhere and was noisily eating it.  


“I know,” he said, around the apple, “but they’re Lucas and Max. They’ll either be making out or yelling at each other, and I don’t think they need me for either of those two things.”  


“Fair enough,” she agreed. “Don’t you want to go and talk to El and Will as well?”  


“I will, later,” said Dustin. “It’s my turn on Cerebro after Mike anyway, so I can call Suzie after that. But I want to give them their own space too.”  


Robin looked at Dustin. He looked the way he normally looked, both cheerful and serious, but she could see something else there as well.  


“I get it,” she said. “I’ve been there too. All your friends, off in their own weird relationship bubbles.”  


“I’ve got my own bubble,” Dustin replied, sounding honestly offended. “I’ve got Suzie.”  


“Yeah, true,” she acknowledged. “More than I’ve ever managed.”  


“Don’t fret, Robin,” said Dustin, full of confidence. “You’ll find the right guy eventually. There’s got to be someone out there who’s worthy of you, but then again, you are pretty awesome, so probably not loads of them.”  


Robin eyed Dustin, trying to decide if that was a good thing or not. Then she blinked, and before she really knew what was happening, words were coming out of her mouth.  


“If there is someone out there,” she said, softly, so that only Dustin could hear it, “they’re not going to be a guy.” And then she stopped talking as her brain caught up with the enormity of saying it out loud to somebody else, for only the third time in her life, and in the middle of her workplace no less. It was like the feeling of suddenly falling off a tightrope, plummeting through the air, and not knowing how far you were going to fall.  


But, somehow, miraculously, Dustin’s expression broke into a perfect model of dawning realisation, and then into – for some insane reason – a massive grin.  


“Awesome!” he said, and Robin had no idea quite how to respond to that, so she just sat there, feeling strange but maybe happy, as Dustin continued talking about how privileged he felt to be entrusted with this information, and how his second cousin in Ottawa was like her but was basically married to her partner of twelve years, and how he was going to go and find her (Robin, that was, not his second cousin) a girlfriend, and so on, and so on, until Steve finally rescued her from Dustin’s nonstop monologue, smirking his head off as he dragged Dustin over to the door and quietly whispered that he’d said that they weren’t together the whole time. And then the two of them went out onto the empty street, so that Steve could tell Dustin not to share this information with anyone (she guessed, from Dustin’s penitent expression and the uncommon seriousness on Steve’s face).  


And it felt strange, but it was good, because it turned out that the fall hadn’t been very far after all, and it was much nicer down here on the ground than the tightrope had been.  


***********  


**Wednesday 6th November, 1985:**  


The lunch hall of Winterton High was too crowded at the best of times. Today it would just be too much, Will had decided.  


He had found an unlocked classroom to eat lunch in, alone, and had made sure to turn all of the lights on. Not through fear, of course, but there was no harm in being cautious, even if there was no reason for that. After all, their flickering would act as a helpful alarm system in the case of an emergency.  


El had stayed at home that morning, stricken by a combination of flu and memory. Will didn’t blame her at all; they both had very particular and not entirely pleasant memories associated with the 6th November two years ago, after all. Perhaps he should have remained at home as well, Will wondered; but then, as he’d come to think in the past year, that was how _he_ won. Not properly, not entirely, but a little bit. If _he_ knew that Will still lay awake at night listening to the sound of the ocean wind, wondering if _he_ would come back again, if _he_ would try to find Will Byers and destroy him a little bit more this time – well, _he_ would enjoy that, inasmuch as a boundless, formless mind from beyond the reaches of existence could feel enjoyment.  


Will shook his head like a dog trying to dislodge water from its ear. _He_ was not here. _He_ was not going to come to Winterton, could not break out of the Upside-Down alone. It was over, it was over, it was all entirely over.  


And then the door swung open, and Will almost fell off his chair as his heart convulsed in a strange terror. He caught himself just in time, and saw who had opened it – not a Demogorgon, nor a swirling mist of incorporeal malice, but a dark-haired boy who looked faintly familiar, and who looked just as shocked to see Will as Will had been to see him. They stared at each other for a moment, and then the other boy spoke in a tone of confusion. “Hi,” he said, in an accent that was not entirely American. “What brings you to this classroom?”  


Will was unsure quite what his reason would be, so he took the next-best path. “You’re Josh, right?” he asked the boy. “Josh Bateyi?”  


As if a switch had been flipped, the boy suddenly beamed. “That’s my name! Well, sort of.”  


“Sort of?”  


“Josh isn’t the full name. It’s short for Coşkun. But nobody here seems to know quite what to do with a squiggle under the letter ‘s’, or that they’re supposed to pronounce the ‘c’ as if it’s a ‘j’ in English. So that seemed easier.”  


Will leaned back slowly, digesting this information. Josh closed the door, and drew up a chair on the other side of the table, sitting down and staring slightly over Will’s shoulder, as if he didn’t want to make eye contact.  


“I think we’re in the same literature class,” explained Will. “I tend to sit on the other side of the classroom to you.”  


Josh tried to click his fingers, and failed. “Will Byers? The guy that started a week later than everyone else?”  


Will nodded. “I just moved here from Indiana.”  


“Nice to meet you properly, Will,” said Josh, smiling. It was an interesting smile, Will thought (and then wondered where the thought had come from); it was the smile of someone who did genuinely seem to think that it was nice to meet somebody that he knew nothing about. “So, what brings you to Room 32?”  


“I guess I just didn’t feel like eating in the hall today,” said Will. “And this room was unlocked, so I thought there’d be no harm if I came in. We used to do that at my old school all the time.”  


“Worry not,” said Josh. “This is the one that you’re allowed in, if you know the right people.”  


“Who are the right people?” asked Will, feeling a slight smile creep across his face.  


“Well, in this case, me, I suppose,” said Josh. “But, ultimately, Miss Teller. It’s her room.”  


“Why does she let you in?”  


“Because I asked, I guess. I sort of wanted somewhere a bit more peaceful, where I could read or work on things.”  


“What’s wrong with the library?” said Will.  


“Not much,” acknowledged Josh, “but it’s a bit small, and full of people. And I don’t tend to be the quietest when I’m working. Also, here I can do my midday prayers by myself, which is pretty nice.” He paused, and then looked straight at Will with a strange intensity. “Something bothering you? Something happened to make you try a whole bunch of random classrooms to see if they were unlocked?”  


“Well,” said Will, “it’s kind of a long story. But today’s just not a great day for me. Something happened two years ago today, and I thought I’d rather be alone.”  


Josh nodded, then said, “Would you rather I leave? I can risk the librarian’s anger for one day, if you like?”  


“It’s fine,” said Will. “You seem OK.”  


Josh smiled, with that same strange genuineness about it. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Will quietly working his way through the lunch that Jonathan had made him that morning (for Joyce had finally managed to secure a steady job, which on top of its appalling pay and difficult customers required her to start working at six in the morning).  


“Hey,” said Josh, breaking the silence. “The girl who you normally sit with at lunch, is she your sister?”  


“She is,” confirmed Will. “Her name’s El. She couldn’t make it in today – stomach bug.”  


Josh nodded. “I sit near to her in math. She seems really nice.”  


Will sighed inwardly; a couple of boys had already tried to approach him for information on El. “She is. She’s got a boyfriend, though, if that was what you were wondering.”  


“What?” said Josh. “Oh, no, I don’t – I mean, I wasn’t – that’s not where this was going. I just wondered why she wasn’t here with you. Whether the thing that you said happened to you happened to her as well. Sorry.”  


Will relaxed a little. “Sort of. Like I say, it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.”  


“No rush,” said Josh. “I understand. Not always fun to talk about these things. Especially to people you’ve known for five minutes. Especially if you’re still feeling a bit too close to whatever happened.”  


His tone was light, but there was something else there as well, a strange certainty. Will looked at Josh, really looked, and saw that the boy’s hands were moving frantically against one another, his thumbs working the backs of his hands like they were the controllers on an arcade game, even as he smiled and spoke happily to Will.  


“Are you alright?” asked Will, quietly.  


Josh followed Will’s gaze to his hands, saw how restless they were. “Oh, never mind me. I’m fine.” He paused. “It’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.”  


***********  


**Sunday 1st December, 1985:**  


Nancy entered the basement to find Mike lying on the floor, face down.  


“What are you doing, loser?” she asked. “Did you forget how to sit up or something?”  


But her brother said nothing, and when Nancy rolled him over, she could see that his eyes were red and his nose running.  


“Sorry,” she whispered. “Didn’t realise.”  


“It’s fine,” said Mike, in a strange and lifeless tone. “I’m fine.”  


“Have you seen your eyes? Or your face? You don’t look like you’re having the time of your life down here.”  


“I’ve got an eye infection,” offered Mike slowly, but it seemed like he wasn’t particularly convinced by his own excuse either, so he sighed and sat up, leaning back against the wall. Nancy sat down next to him.  


“Missing her?” she asked. Mike tilted his head in affirmation. “Me too.”  


“You’re missing El too?” said Mike, with the hint of a smile. Nancy punched his upper arm, but let out a slight snort of laughter.  


“Absolutely,” she said. “She’s the only manageable one of you lot.”  


“What about Will?”  


“OK, fine, him too. If only I’d been allowed to keep them here, and send you and Dustin off to Virginia.”  


“Or been allowed to go with them,” Mike suggested. Nancy sighed.  


“Yeah. If only.”  


They sat in silence, watching the rain stream down through the window at the top of the stairs.  


“I know it sucks that we couldn’t see them this Thanksgiving, what with the flu and everything,” Nancy began, but was cut off by her brother.  


“It does. I’m still annoyed about that. But that’s not it.”  


“What is it, then?”  


Mike fidgeted slightly. “It’s that there isn’t a finish line, I guess. I don’t know how long I’ve got to wait like this.”  


“Well, until Christmas, surely,” said Nancy. “We can book the bus tickets this afternoon, if you like. And if they all get flu again, then I guess we will too.”  


Mike grinned. “That sounds good. But that’s not what I mean.” His face fell again. “What happens after that? We get back from Virginia, and then we go back to school again, and then maybe see each other for a few days in Easter or something like that, and then back here again, and so on, and so on. And they won’t come back to Hawkins. Not properly.”  


Nancy opened her mouth, but her brother continued.  


“You’ve only got a year, until you can go off to college with Jonathan. For me, I’ve got all of high school until I can even think about that, and who knows what’ll happen then. It’s not like all six of us will end up living in the same run-down set of dorms in Somewhere, Massachusetts. It’s not like we can go back to what we had.” He ran his hands through his hair, and cleared his throat. “I just need to face the facts. We’re done. The Party is over.”  


Nancy shuffled closer to Mike, and slung her arm around his shoulders. He made a noise of protest, but did not try and shake her off.  


“Listen,” she said. “You’ll get used to this. It’s just hurting at the moment because it’s new. And the Party isn’t over, it’s just further away. It’s not going to stop them from being your friends.”  


Mike only sighed slightly and rolled his eyes. Nancy took a deep breath, as though preparing for a high dive.  


“Right,” she said. “You’re only getting this once, so it had better work. In Lord of the Rings, when the Fellowship breaks, when Frodo and Sam go to Mordor and everyone else does other things, did they stop being friends then? Did Merry and Pippin meet Frodo at the end of the book, and they just stared awkwardly at each other? Did Strider not invite Frodo to his wedding? Did Gandalf make some better friends instead?”  


A brief, beautiful silence fell. Mike’s jaw, slowly and elegantly, dropped.  


“What?” said Nancy, defensively. “I might have read your book once, maybe. A while back. It was OK, I guess.”  


Mike’s eyes had taken on a strange, thousand-yard stare. “I don’t believe it,” he whispered, then repeated it again, much louder. “I don’t believe it! You read Lord of the Rings, and I’m only just finding out about this now? You’re trying to cheer me up, trying to distract me, by talking about Lord of the Rings?”  


“Did it work?”  


“Hell yeah, it worked!” yelled Mike, and then they were both laughing, laughing like they hadn’t in years, and Mike was punching her in the arm, and she was fighting back, and the basement seemed a lot lighter than it normally did. Finally, when they were both gasping for breath, they abated, and leaned back against the wall, grinning.  


“Thanks,” said Mike, eventually, so quietly that she barely heard him.  


She smirked. “You’re welcome. Just as long as you accept that I know best.”  


“Yeah, that’s going to happen,” he replied, still smiling, but it died down.  


She looked at him, questioning.  


“I’ll be OK,” he said, and this time it seemed more certain. “But I might not be yet. And I still miss them. And I know, I know, it’s better this time, because I know that they’re alive, and when I call El, she can answer me this time. But it’s still not great.”  


Nancy nodded. “I know. I know. But we’ll get through this. We’ve literally killed aliens and monsters. We can do anything we want.”  


They remained in a comfortable silence for a bit, not talking, not fighting.  


“Why did you come down here anyway?” asked Mike, after a few minutes.  


Nancy shrugged, tried to make it look natural. “Maybe I just wanted a change of scenery.”  


“You never come down here.”  


“Well, I wasn’t going outside. It’s horrible out there.”  


“Why not just stay upstairs?”  


Nancy looked away. “Upstairs isn’t great at the moment.”  


Mike nodded, understanding, and put his own arm around his sister’s shoulders.  


“You think they’re going to split up?” he asked.  


“Probably one day,” said Nancy. “But I doubt they’ll do it any time soon.”  


“What happened?” asked Mike, and she knew that he was asking about far more than the harsh words and passive-aggressive jibes that her parents had thrown at each other through the morning.  


“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, they were never exactly the romantic ideal. But they seemed to be alright with it, and after – you know, Starcourt and everything – it was like Mom was really trying. But Dad wasn’t, and then she just stopped. And now we’re here.”  


Mike nodded again, and they continued to sit.  


“Still,” Nancy said eventually, getting to her feet. “Not much we can do about it, anyway.” And with that, she made for the stairs.  


“Where are you going?” said Mike.  


“Oh,” she said, her eyes darting around the room. “I’ve got a project I’m working on. I should probably get back to that.”  


And with that, she was gone.  


After a few minutes, Mike crawled slowly into the blanket fort that he had never allowed to be torn down, and closed his eyes, and went back to remembering everything, as he had been doing before Nancy had interrupted him.  


***********  


**Tuesday 10th December, 1985:**  


Nikolay Andreyevich Palenko was going home.  


He had generally assumed that it would happen one day, as a vague and abstract concept, but only in the last few days had this been raised to the status of an actual fact. Since then, he had barely been able to sleep with excitement and nerves, counting down the minutes until he would be allowed to breathe the real air again.  


It had started when one of the many, effectively faceless, guards had barged into the cell they were holding him in, and without a word had hauled him out and dragged him along the corridors of the secret prison, apparently relishing Nikolay’s unwillingness to cooperate and walk alongside him. He had been deposited in a room he hadn’t seen before, one that actually appeared vaguely pleasant, and after a few seconds, he had been joined by another man.  


This other man was tall and handsome, with close blond hair and piercing blue eyes, looking vaguely as though he had recently stepped out of a filming studio in Hollywood. His military uniform was spotless, and the American flag on it seemed to have been polished somehow, if it was possible to polish a strip of fabric. He smiled in a disarming manner, and stuck out his hand.  


“Hi,” he said in a pleasant tenor. “I’m Jack Beeching. Pleasure to meet you, Mr Palenko.”  


Nikolay shook his hand, noticing that Beeching gripped it with an unexpected fervour. “Delighted to meet you too,” he replied in an English that had long ago lost the faintest hint of a Ukrainian accent. “Absolutely delighted. This has really made my day.”  


Beeching chuckled, and beckoned Nikolay to sit. Nikolay did not.  


“So,” he said, once it was clear that no movement was forthcoming. “Nikolay Palenko. Arrested on September 29th in Neumann, Michigan, and held in custody since. Guilty of espionage on – what was it, missiles?”  


“I feel like you’re hoping that I’ll say ‘jet fighters’, or something like that,” said Nikolay, “so that you can call it a confession. And, for the record, it certainly wasn’t jet fighters.”  


Beeching smiled once again, displaying a number of shining white teeth.  


“Why are you trying to jump through these hoops?” asked Nikolay. “You’ve just been keeping me in solitary confinement for around two months – I think – with no lawyers, and no trial, and no contact with the outside world. And also with the occasional beating from guards. Why are you so concerned about the due process of law now? Got an inspector from the government coming round?”  


“Mr Palenko,” said Beeching, still smiling. “I am the government.”  


“L’état, c’est moi,” muttered Nikolay, under his breath.  


“And no, that wasn’t the aim at all,” continued Beeching. “If you would like to give us a confession of exactly what you were doing, that would be very much appreciated. But I think we both know that you’re not going to at this stage, so we’re not wasting any more time on you.”  


“Killing me, then?” asked Nikolay.  


Beeching shook his head. “We’re not barbarians, Mr Palenko. We’re the civilised world. We’re sending you back to Russia.”  


It only took Nikolay a few seconds to understand, and when he did, he started to laugh. “Spy-swapping? Really?”  


Beeching tilted his head.  


“And you’ve decided that I’m not the best use of your time and resources,” Nikolay continued, “so you’re trading me in for one of your own. When did you decide that I wasn’t worth the effort any more?”  


“We didn’t,” said Beeching. “Not like that. We’ve been angling for an exchange for some time, and now we’ve finally got enough of you to get the people we want back. Kline was very helpful, eventually.”  


Nikolay reflected on this, having been vaguely aware that somewhere else in the chain of command was an American being bought out by the name of Kline. But that was down in Indiana, in the town given the codename of _Sobor_ , or ‘Cathedral’. Nikolay hadn’t really known what was happening in Indiana, but a lot of people had gone in there, and he’d stopped hearing anything about them after July, after some mysterious fire at a small-town mall. It hadn’t been his area, in any case.  


“You’re leaving in a few days,” said Beeching. “Back to Mother Russia. I’m sure you’ve missed her.”  


“I’m Ukrainian, you cretin,” said Nikolay. “Read your files.”  


Beeching shrugged. “We’ll come and collect you when everything’s ready. Then, off to neutral territory for an exchange, and then you’re out of our hands.”  


“So soon,” said Nikolay. “I feel like I’ve barely got to know everyone here. Oh, how I will miss them all.”  


“We’ll miss you too, Mr Palenko,” replied Beeching. “I’m sure our guards will write to you with fond regard. But, believe me, it is for the very best of causes. There’s an American that we’ve been very keen to get back home.”  


***********  


**Date indeterminate:**  


The dead man had constructed himself a sort of ritual since his arrival here, in the dark place. There were no days or nights here, no sun to mark the passage of time, so instead a day lasted for precisely as long as he wanted it to. When he woke up, he would hack open one of the tins he had found, and regardless of the contents would devour it. It normally contained enough water to banish any thirst, but – and this was one of the many strange things about the whole place – that didn’t happen particularly often anyway. Nor did hunger, for that matter; after a few days without any sustenance, he would begin to feel weak, but before that, there were no pangs of starvation, no dryness of the mouth. He presumed that this was how others had been able to survive here before.  


After eating, he would patrol the bounds of his little world, checking the traps he had established to see if anything had tried to get in again. If something had, and if the trap had not killed it, then he would finish the job with one of the many improvised weapons he had gathered.  


After this would be what he had come to think of as his excursions, where he would venture into town. It was just as dark there, and the strange floating things in the air became if anything more frequent; although all of the familiar buildings still stood in their normal places, they had all been taken and twisted by the contagion that filled up this entire world. The creeping roots (and once or twice he actually saw them creeping slowly across an open space), the fungal structures, the shapes that he had not yet worked out the nature of; everywhere, in every building, the Upside-Down had crawled in and built something new and sickly-strange. There were animals here, too – he rarely saw the small ones, and tried with all his abilities to avoid the larger ones, but from time to time he would notice a scurrying out of the corner of his eye, would see a wormlike thing move with an unnatural speed and grace, or perhaps something that looked like a normal mouse until it opened its mouth in the familiar five-pointed star.  


Once he had seen something flying towards him. He didn’t go into town for a couple of days after that, even though it had missed.  


In town, he would collect things. A lot of the household items of Hawkins had their own reflections here, which apart from the slime and the shifting lichen seemed perfectly serviceable. With these, in the afternoon, he would make new traps, or would extend his dwelling place a bit. At first, he had spent most of his time trying to find a way back through, another secret Gate, but after god-knows-how-many days, he had come to the conclusion that there was nothing like that within Hawkins. He still looked, of course, and still tried to work out how to make the lights flash on the other side, but with no success. Then, finally, in what he had decided to call the evening, he would patrol his territory again, destroying anything within the bounds of the traps that didn’t look right. And then he would crawl into the lair he had built for himself, a room with about twenty locks and reinforced walls on all sides (including floor and ceiling), and would sleep, until the next day when the whole thing would happen again.  


There was one thing that played on his mind more than anything else, and that was the whereabouts of the Mind Flayer. He had heard the descriptions, heard how it was a billowing shadow as tall as a skyscraper that towered over Hawkins and watched everything beneath. He knew how these things worked, and was fairly sure that it could not have been killed for good at Starcourt when the gate closed –  


_no, don’t think about that –_  


but it was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it, too, had its own lair, its own place where it could hide and lick its wounds. Perhaps it had decided that there was easier prey than the people of Hawkins on the other side of reality. But the problem with the second was that it had clearly borne something of a grudge last time, and did not seem like the sort of thing to just give up; and the problem with the first was that everywhere around here, this entire world, seemed like _his_ lair.  


But he would cross that bridge when he came to it, Jim Hopper decided, as he stood on the trap-laden verandah of his old cabin, looking over his dark and shadowed kingdom. He was fine. He could manage like this.  



	3. The Visitors (Cracking Up)

**Thursday 26th December, 1985:**  


When the doorbell rang, El nearly fell off the arm of the sofa, where she had been perching in a nervous anticipation for the past two hours. Looking over at Will as she shakily stood up, she noticed that he had clearly been feeling roughly the same; his face was white and his breathing hurried, and the pencil he had been toying with fell unnoticed to the floor as he too raised himself to his feet. She caught his eye, and cracked a smile, one which he returned with just as much excitement and trepidation all at once.  


“Ready?” he said to her.  


“Ready,” El confirmed. Together, they made their way through to the hallway and to the front door. The doorbell sounded again, twice this time (Will rolled his eyes), before El pulled open the door.  


And there they were. All four of them, standing close together like the people on the front of Will’s tape that said Queen, Dustin’s hand caught in the motion of reaching up to give the doorbell another try, and all four with eyes as wide as El’s and Will’s presumably were.  


There was a half-second where nobody seemed to know quite what to do, and then the two sides collided in a six-person hug, all four of the new arrivals talking at once, all telling El and Will how much they had missed them, and how glad they were to be in Winterton at last. And El, in the midst of it, surrounded on all sides by her friends, felt the familiar and half-forgotten thrill of a sort of happiness which had been missing for almost half a year now. The group embrace lasted until Jonathan and Nancy, both chuckling slightly, pointed out that they were blocking the door and that nobody else could get inside, and El and Will ushered their friends into their house.  


As everyone was taking her shoes off, Mike looked up seemingly without thinking about it, and stared right into El’s eyes. She stared back, as she always did, and she noticed his face curve into a very familiar smile. Hers was presumably doing the same. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, and then he shook his head and took two steps towards her, knocking an indignant Lucas out of the way slightly, and their lips met in a quick and wonderful kiss.  


“I missed you,” he whispered to her when they had moved apart again. “As you know.”  


“I missed you too,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”  


“Always,” he replied.  


They had developed the ability, over the past however-long, to read each other’s body language with near-fluency (a helpful tool for when El didn’t quite know how to put her thoughts into words), and when they looked at each other now, it was with the promise of a long and uninterrupted conversation later, once everything had settled down. They kissed again for another brief second, and then Mike turned to Will, who was inexpertly trying to defend himself against Dustin’s barrage of words, and pulled his friend into a tight hug. El smiled slightly at Will’s startled but overjoyed expression, and then Max was there, hugging her as well and talking almost too fast to follow, with Lucas occasionally chipping in.  


El closed her eyes for a moment. This was good.  


A while later, after Joyce had returned with a terrifyingly large stack of pizza and they had managed to consume the whole lot of it in under twenty minutes, after the four of them (and occasionally Nancy, who had spent most of the meal wordlessly staring directly at Jonathan) had told the epic tale of their bus journey from Hawkins to Louisville to Richmond to Winterton, after the full tour of the house had been given, El and Mike were able to slip away from the others, and made their way to her room.  


“Three inches,” commanded El, as Mike went to close the door. He nodded understandingly, and left it slightly ajar, and in that moment, El remembered once again what love was like when the subject of it was there in person, rather than several hundred miles away up a windy hill.  


They didn’t say much for the first ten minutes or so, but once the kissing had subsided, the talking could begin.  


“I’m so glad I’m here at last,” Mike said, softly. “I’ve spent most of the last three months thinking about this, you know. About you. About being with you again.”  


El smiled, and nestled in closer to Mike. “Me too. Better than Dustin’s tower.”  


Mike made a wordless noise of agreement.  


“How’s school, then?” he asked. “I know we’ve talked about it a lot, but –“  


“Not the same,” El finished. “I know.”  


So she told him everything, in sentences that were noticeably longer and more confident than they had been back in September. She told him about how mathematics was easy, because it all made sense and everything followed the rules; and about how literature was difficult because almost everyone was using long words when they didn’t have to, and they kept trying to foreshadow things when nobody asked for that, and the stories didn’t just hurry up and get to the point. She told him about her friend Maria who sat next to her in History, and who would hang around with her at lunch. She told him about the few other sort-of-friends she’d made, who didn’t always sit with her but were still nice to her. In a brief diversion, she told him about Martin Luther and the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, which still seemed to hold his interest despite the fact that she was just reciting her class notes.  


She told him about living with Will and Jonathan and Joyce, and how it felt to be in a family, about how everyone eventually came to click into the same rhythm and motion and how they had all come to know a hundred new tiny facts about one another. She told him about how nobody batted an eyelid (a new expression, which she was quite fond of) at school to hear that her and Will were twins; and she told him quietly, so he wouldn’t think it was strange (and he didn’t, as it turned out), that sometimes she thought of Will as her brother anyway. She told him about their Thanksgiving (and how she didn’t quite understand the whole point of it) and their Christmas, and all the while, he lay there next to her, gazing into her eyes with a look that she could only describe as wonder, occasionally interjecting with questions or with comments, their fingers laced together and their presence alongside each other never feeling as natural as it had done before this.  


Eventually, Mike glanced at his watch, and let out a slightly surprised noise.  


“Did you know we’ve been here for an hour?” he said. She shook her head, having had no idea that she had been talking for that long.  


“We should go back down to the others,” said Mike, with a slight hint of nervousness underlying his words. “Or I should, at least.”  


She blinked, and Mike apparently interpreted it as confusion, because he hurried to explain.  


“Not that I’m bored of spending time with you, obviously,” he specified, and she smiled slightly, in the full knowledge that that was not going to be the case. “But I’m – I mean, we should – I mean, this time, I want to do things differently.”  


“What do you mean?” she asked.  


Mike bit his lip slightly, as he always did when he was trying to find the right way of saying something. In this, they were both alike.  


“You remember last summer, when we were always together?” he said. “When I couldn’t tear myself away from you, and I kept dragging you away from everyone else so that we could be alone?”  


She nodded.  


“I don’t want it to be like that this time,” he said. “I’ve got to get it right. It isn’t fair. On anyone. Not on you, since you should get to spend time with the others too. And not on them. And definitely not on Will. And I know that –“  


She cut him off, because he was starting to ramble.  


“Mike,” she said. “It’s OK. I know.”  


She saw the tension leave him slightly, like a balloon half-deflating, and he smiled. “You’re the best,” he told her. “You always understand.”  


She smiled, and nodded with more than a hint of pride. He grinned in amusement.  


“I –“ he said, and choked on the next word slightly, but then decided to try again, with an awkward grin. “I love you. I love you very much.”  


“I love you too,” said El, silently delighting that he had finally said the words to her, rather than just yelling them at everyone else on the other side of a door. “Now go and see Will.”  


They kissed again, and then Mike descended the stairs, with Max bursting into her room a few seconds later, and throwing herself onto the beanbag that Jonathan had given her as one of her Christmas presents.  


“So,” she said, coolly. “Found a new best friend to replace me yet?”  


“Yes,” said El, keeping a completely straight face. She held it for as long as she could, whilst Max’s expression fell, swinging first into shock and then confusion, until it was no longer possible, and she burst out laughing. Max joined her a second later, with a delightful look of annoyed but pleased realisation. And after they finished laughing, they were talking too, for another hour or so; and after Max, Dustin had to come and see her; and then she went back downstairs to where everyone was, and they all talked, and kept doing so until the early hours of the morning, when Joyce fondly yelled at them all to go to sleep.  


*******  


**Friday 27th December, 1985:**  


Without much warning, the hood was pulled from Nikolay’s face, and he found himself dazed and blinking in the unexpected brightness of twenty floodlights. The hands on his shoulders loosened their grip slightly, and he staggered to his feet.  


“Palenko,” said one of the American soldiers to a man with a clipboard. “Nikolay Andreyevich. Transported from Rosemary Facility; part of Exchange Beta.”  


The man with the clipboard nodded, and made a mark with his pen. The soldiers at Nikolay’s back shoved him forwards, towards a loose huddle of people dressed in the same standardised white-and-black prison clothing as Nikolay. As he came closer, he heard the familiar tones of the Russian language.  


“Comrades!” he said enthusiastically. “How are you enjoying your stay in the free world?”  


A couple of heads turned at his approach, and a few of them chuckled. Nikolay made his way into the crowd, as his soldiers retreated slightly to join the other guards.  


“Good afternoon, comrade,” said one of the other prisoners in a deep Muscovite accent, extending his hand to Nikolay. “I am Dr Yermolay Ilyich Ignat’ev. Welcome to our little gathering.”  


“Nikolay Andreyevich Palenko,” said Nikolay, grasping Dr Ignat’ev’s hands in greeting. “Do you happen to know where we are?”  


“We’ve got a rough guess, but only that,” said Dr Ignat’ev. “From the facility we were held at, we were driving for around six hours, and we were being held somewhere near the Great Lakes. From the light we could see through the side of the vehicle, travelling south. Do you have any idea?”  


“I’m not quite sure where they were holding me,” said Nikolay, “but I was captured in Michigan. Code name of Charcoal for my area, if that helps.”  


Dr Ignat’ev shook his head. “Most of us were down at the Cathedral. You know, the site down in that town called Hawkins, in Indiana. That was where we were captured, when the Americans stormed the base.”  


Nikolay looked around at the number of Soviet agents present, counting them, then turned back to Dr Ignat’ev with surprise.  


“They stormed the base and captured you,” he said, slowly, “and there’s seventeen other people here. I know for a fact that there were far more people assigned to the Cathedral than that. Did they kill all the rest?”  


“Quite a lot of them, yes,” Dr Ignat’ev confirmed. “But some of the others escaped before the Americans could get in; we had another way out. That’s who we’re waiting for now, I think.”  


And wait they did, for another hour or two, until the sound of a number of military vehicles penetrated their huddle, and a few trucks juddered to a halt nearby. A much larger number of soldiers jumped out, and set to work ushering more prisoners towards the man with the clipboard, who was not far from their little huddle.  


“Thirty-six prisoners from Parsley Facility,” said one of the soldiers, then glanced again at the paper in his hands, with a confused expression. “No, sorry, thirty-seven. All part of Exchange Alpha.”  


The man with the clipboard inspected his own papers, and nodded in agreement. The new prisoners were marked off one by one, and they made their own way over to the group; the first was a tall, heavily-built man with close-cropped blond hair, identified by his guard as Ivan Ivanovich Vosemov. Nikolay called out a cheerful greeting to Vosemov, but was met with a flat stare in return, and he abandoned his efforts at diplomacy.  


“He’s here,” muttered Dr Ignat’ev, staring at another man in the group of new prisoners. “Should have known he’d make it out.”  


“Who?” asked Nikolay, craning his neck to look.  


“Colonel Ozerov,” said Dr Ignat’ev, in a tone of voice which strongly suggested that he had not greatly missed this man. “He was the commander down at the Cathedral.”  


Ozerov, a man with cold eyes and a face apparently carved from granite, was the last to join them in the group, and then they were on the move, with the American soldiers herding them away from the circle of floodlights, into the dark. As Nikolay walked, his eyes began to adjust, and he noticed that they had been standing in an enormous aircraft hangar this whole time – one with a jet parked at the other end of it. The jet carried the markings of Finnair, and waiting on the steps was the familiar figure of Jack Beeching, who waved genially at the prisoners as they approached.  


“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Beeching. A soldier offered him a megaphone, but he waved it away. “As I’m sure you all know by now, the government of the United States is sending you back home to Russia.”  


The non-Russians present, Nikolay among them, exchanged a series of looks.  


“You all know the rules of these things by now, I’m sure,” continued Beeching. “You were presumably briefed on this before your spying mission commenced. We are exchanging you for a certain number of American citizens being detained in the Soviet Union, and for a couple of other things that we won’t go into now; the exchange will take place in Rovaniemi, in Finland. From there, you will be placed in the hands of your own countrymen, who are, I believe, taking you as far as Novosibirsk for debriefing.”  


Beeching smiled, and Nikolay saw that it was the excited smile of a man who believed he was about to pay a bargain price for something truly precious.  


The flight to Rovaniemi was long and arduous. Nikolay spoke to a few of his fellow prisoners for some of it – Dr Ignat’ev was pleasant company, even if he did refuse to tell Nikolay exactly what they had been doing at the Cathedral, and one of the scientists who had served under him was a fellow native of Odessa, which he and Nikolay bonded over. He slept, too – the jet was by no means comfortable, but it beat his cell by a long chalk, if only because it was heading in the direction of home. And then, eventually, as he leisurely drifted in and out of sleep, he registered that the plane was beginning to descend, and in what felt like only a few minutes, the doors were being heaved open and the American soldiers were chivvying their prisoners, who were soon to lose this status, out of the jet and into the bitter cold of the airstrip at Rovaniemi.  


Nikolay was one of the last to leave, with only Vosemov, the tall and silent soldier, behind him. The steps provided were not entirely tall enough for the aeroplane, and Nikolay was forced to leap perhaps half a metre down, from the door to the top of the steps. Steadying himself – for the steps were slick with snow – he turned to offer Vosemov a hand, but the other man waved it away, and stepped down in one of the most awkward motions Nikolay had seen in his life, as though Vosemov was not entirely sure how his legs worked. Nikolay did not waste too much time dwelling on this, as the snow was driving sideways at him now and he was already beginning to shiver, so he made his hasty way down the steps and across the tarmac, to another hangar.  


Nikolay shook the snow from his long hair, and gratefully accepted the long coat that a Soviet soldier – and he felt a very strange sense of relief at seeing that uniform again – handed to him, which he wrapped closely around himself. His fellow prisoners were all wearing them, and were standing on the left side of the hangar, where a contingent of American soldiers guarded them; on the right-hand side was a single man guarded by the Soviets. He had a thick black hood over his head, and stood uncertainly.  


There was a bit of ceremony to go through first, with the commanders of both sides (Beeching had apparently elected not to make the journey with them) shaking hands in a stilted and formulaic manner, and conferring in low tones, presumably about the trade. Nikolay saw both of them turn to look at the single American, and both exchange shrugs. Then another American interjected, and demanded – it appeared – to see beneath the hood.  


The hood was removed from the American’s head, and Nikolay, who was watching the proceedings like a hawk, gasped slightly at the site of the disfigured face underneath. The man’s right eye seemed to be completely missing, and his left eye had apparently fared little better, squinting around the scars that latticed over his cheek and the remains of his nose at the two American soldiers. The man’s hair was a pale grey, almost white, and was somewhat unevenly cut; he cowered slightly, but with the posture of someone who was not used to this, who had been standing tall and proud for their entire life.  


One of them, whose lips Nikolay was able to read, asked the man to confirm his identity. He did, and the soldier nodded with satisfaction, but Nikolay could not make out the name, which had been forced through trembling lips. The other American soldier held out his hand, and his Soviet counterpart handed a stainless-steel briefcase to him, which – when he opened it to check the contents – was full of papers, some handwritten and some typed. Then the Americans, offering an arm to their prisoner, helped him over to the other side of the hangar, and the Soviet prisoners, for their part, moved in the opposite direction. As they passed the scarred man, halfway, Nikolay heard an intake of breath from behind him, and turned to see Colonel Ozerov staring. Then, as Nikolay watched him, Ozerov’s features curved from surprise, into a cruel smile, into an expression of calculated neutrality as he noticed Nikolay’s eyes upon him.  


The exchange was complete. The Soviet soldiers moved among the former prisoners, assuring them that they were safe now from the imperialist American thugs. The Americans helped their man to a small door on the side of the hangar, and the three of them disappeared from view. And then the fifty-six Soviet spies and soldiers and scientists were escorted back out into the blizzard, and they boarded another plane – this one significantly more comfortable – and they took off.  


As it turned out, they were not being debriefed in Novosibirsk, as Beeching had claimed. The plane landed briefly in the middle of Siberia to refuel, and then took off again, still heading east.  


“Where are we going?” asked Nikolay to Dr Ignat’ev, who had ended up in the seat next to him. Vosemov was on his other side, and – despite the man’s size – was hunched away from Nikolay, seemingly reluctant to make any kind of physical contact with him. “Where do you think they’re taking us?”  


“If I had to guess,” said Dr Ignat’ev, “I think we’re going to Kamchatka.”  


*******  


**Sunday 29th December, 1985:**  


Winterton was quieter than usual that evening, as Jonathan and Nancy made their winding way through the streets of the town centre. Jonathan was quiet too, quieter than normal, for he had recognised the signs – Nancy, as was apparent from the terseness in her tone and the clenching of her jaw, evidently had something on her mind. She had been this way since they had left the cinema, and Jonathan was waiting for the inevitable outburst. The realisation slowly dawned upon him that he would have to be the one to precipitate it.  


“OK,” he said to her. “What’s going on, Nance?”  


She tightened her grip on his hand. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”  


“Do you know,” remarked Jonathan, “I used to think that you were nothing like Mike at all.”  


That, at least, startled a slight confused laugh out of her. “What are you talking about?”  


“I remember when he used to come over to ours to play with Will, back before he was unbearable,” Jonathan said. “One time, they were out in the woods, and Will came charging into the house to grab me – Mom was working at the time, I think – and Mike was hurt, like, really hurt.”  


“Is this the time that he broke his arm?” said Nancy. “I remember that; Dad took a whole week off work to stay with him and keep his spirits up. Back when he did that sort of stuff.”  


“Well,” Jonathan continued, “when I got to where he was, with Will in floods of tears and talking at around a hundred miles an hour – not sure if I’ve ever heard him that panicked about anything normal –“ (he said the last word in hushed tones, completely at odds with the emptiness of the street – “Mike was lying there on the floor by the tree he’d fallen out of, face as pale as rice pudding and his arm at a really concerning angle. And I went up to him, and said something stupid like ‘Are you OK?’, and he looked at me, and said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s fine. I’m OK.’”  


Nancy’s mouth formed a perfectly straight line. Jonathan could not tell whether she was angry, or trying not to laugh, or indeed both.  


“Nance,” he said, and left it at that.  


They walked in silence for several metres, until finally, she said, “Alright, fine. It hit me when we were watching the film.”  


“That it was a truly dreadful piece of cinema that should never have been allowed to air by a director with any shred of self-respect?”  


She snorted. “Bit bigger than that, although, true, it was indeed rather awful. But there they were, all those actors, humourlessly reciting their patriotic lines about the nobility of their struggle, the glory of self-sacrifice, how they would be willing to lay down their lives for the nation. And then we came out of the cinema, and it was like surfacing for air, because at least they’d stopped going on and on about their bloody nationalism. But it’s not really surfacing, because it’s all around us still, just slightly better disguised. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s a politician talking about the American Dream, about how we’re the home of freedom and the birthplace of liberty, about how our little apple-pie small-towns are the only thing stopping the communists from taking over the world. Every newspaper and radio keeps silent about the machine guns we’re selling to dictators, about the regimes we’re propping up in South Africa and Saudi Arabia and everywhere else – but at least they tell us when we’re sending a space shuttle into orbit, because that shows the world how wonderful the American Way Of Life is. Everywhere you look, there’s a flag, there’s a bald eagle, there’s a rousing story about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. And nobody sees, do they?”  


Jonathan stayed silent, unlocking the car and climbing in; Nancy followed.  


“They don’t get it,” she continued. “They think that this nation is worth dying for, when it experiments on children and lets its citizens die for the slightest political advantage, when it buries the truth as a matter of default. They think we’re the good guys.”  


“Nance,” said Jonathan, “you’re sort of preaching to the choir here. But most people, they like living in the dark like this. They like not having to think about these things.”  


Nancy shook her head so fiercely that it seemed as though it might come loose. “No. They’ve been told not to. If people knew the truth, then maybe they’d think differently.”  


“You’ve got a plan, haven’t you,” he said to her. It was not a question, because he already knew the answer.  


She smiled. “I do. But I’m going to need your help, and I don’t want to make you come along if you don’t want to.”  


“Come along? Are we going somewhere?”  


“I’ve been working on this for a while now,” she said. “I’ve made contact with someone, up in DC. My parents think I’m going to look at a college up there in a couple of days’ time.”  


Jonathan sighed as he started the car. “Fine. But it can’t be for too long.”  


“You can miss some school if you have to,” Nancy said. “I know what your grades are like; you could cook and eat one of the students and they’d still think twice about expelling you.”  


He shook his head. “Not for that. For Will, and El. And Mom. They need me there.”  


Nancy looked as though she wanted to say something, but didn’t. There was a silence, and then Jonathan added, “But yes. Of course I’ll come along. Anything and anywhere for you.”  


“Are you doing this for me?” said Nancy, a hint of a smile in her tone, “Or because you believe it’s the right thing to do?”  


“Well,” said Jonathan, considering, “since you haven’t actually told me what we’re doing yet, I’d have to say definitely the former.”  


She tilted her head to the side, acknowledging the point. “Fair enough. You want to know?”  


Jonathan nodded. “What are we going to do this time?”  


Nancy smiled properly, for the first time in quite a while. “We’re going to bring down the government.”  


*******  


**Tuesday 31st December, 1985:**  


“I’m sorry,” said Mike, and Will turned his head in confusion and alarm, not having noticed the other boy’s presence.  


It was cold and sharp outside in the woods behind Winterton, where the six of them were walking; the leaves made an audible crunch when stood upon, and it seemed like there would be another frost that night too, if the clear skies were anything to go by. Dustin was trying to climb a tree up ahead, egged on by Max and El alike, whilst Lucas stood nearby, apparently torn between the equally powerful desires to join the girls in throwing pinecones and to climb alongside Dustin. Will had been hanging back for much of the walk, with a splitting headache from the previous night of sleeping on the floor – for the four boys had been rotating the privilege of sleeping in a real bed – and had found a cold log to sit on, from where he could watch the tree-climbing antics.  


“Will?” said Mike, after a couple of seconds. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to surprise you.”  


“It’s fine,” said Will. “Wasn’t paying attention.”  


Mike nodded, and the pair of them sat in silence for a minute or two, before it was broken by Mike apologising for the third time.  


“I came to say that I was sorry,” he said. “For the summer. For what happened back then.”  


Will took a slightly larger breath than was necessary, and – without turning his attention away from the tree – said, “What specifically?”  


He could see Mike stiffen slightly beside him, as he spun to face Will. Will continued to look away from him.  


“OK,” said Mike, after a brief pause. “I was going to prepare a whole thing, but then I thought that maybe you’d think that that wouldn’t really count, then. That it would seem too artificial. So here goes.”  


In a motion extremely familiar to Will, who had seen it performed for the last decade or so, Mike nervously scratched at the back of his neck, and then continued.  


“All of last summer,” he said, “I was a terrible friend to you. And the others as well, but mostly to you. I was so wrapped up in having El back from the dead that I forgot that you were as well. I forgot about how good it was to spend time with you, with everyone, because I was obsessed, and I think it took both of you moving away for me to really come to terms with that. It made me notice that I missed you both – in different ways, obviously, but still. I wish I’d spent more time with you back in the summer, that I hadn’t made you feel unwelcome or second-best. That I hadn’t driven you away.”  


Mike paused to study Will’s expression, but Will was an expert at giving nothing away. He’d learnt that skill the hard way.  


“I’m sorry for how I treated you,” Mike continued. “I’m sorry for ignoring you and overlooking you. I’m sorry for putting El first and you last. I’m sorry for destroying things.”  


If Will didn’t know better, he could have sworn that he heard Mike’s voice catch slightly towards the end. So he took another deep breath, and turned to face his friend.  


“What do you mean?” he asked. “Destroying things?”  


“Well,” said Mike. “You know. The Party. Our friendship. The past.”  


Will shook his head slightly, and opened his mouth to say something, but Mike pre-empted him.  


“I made everything fall apart,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking. I made El dump my ass, and left Dustin to fight Russians, and caused you to smash up Castle Byers. And I want to make things right again.”  


“I know,” replied Will. “I have noticed, you know. All the time that you’ve been spending with me this week.”  


“Well,” said Mike, somewhat defensively, “I was also doing it because I actually like spending time with you –“  


“You’re kind of doing so out of pity, though,” said Will. “Or duty, or something. Because you’re telling yourself that you have to.”  


“I’m trying to take care not to get obsessed again,” said Mike, looking away. “I’m just trying to get things back to normal, and then I won’t have to think about it any more.”  


Will opened his mouth, and then thought better and closed it, and then overruled his previous decision, and said, before he could take it back, “Mike, not everything is about you.”  


There was a silence, broken only by the sound of Lucas yelling to Dustin to wait and beginning to scramble after him.  


“What do you mean?” asked Mike, rather quietly.  


“You’re acting like you’re the only one that can fix everything,” Will told him. “And that everything that went wrong was because of you. The world doesn’t revolve around you, Wheeler.”  


Mike said nothing.  


“You weren’t the cause of everything that summer,” said Will. “We were growing up. Like you said, we’re not kids any more.”  


Mike turned his head even further away from Will then, and said, “I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have told you what we could and couldn’t do.”  


“Why not?” said Will. “It’s the truth.”  


“And then you went and destroyed Castle Byers,” said Mike. “You took a baseball bat to your childhood, because I told you that it had to be over. And ever since I said that, things have been different between us, like I broke something. Like we can’t be friends and grow up at the same time.”  


Then he turned back, with a look of concern in his swimming eyes, and said, “Will, what’s wrong?”  


Will half-registered that his breathing was more audible than it normally was, but did not think about it, as he said, “Really, Mike? You think that was what did it?”  


Mike adopted his patented squint of confusion.  


“You think that was the thing that made me angry?” asked Will, almost in a voice of genuine curiosity. “That we weren’t kids any more?”  


“Wasn’t that the main thing?” said Mike. “I mean, you did go and smash up your childhood things immediately afterwards; I thought the symbolism was kind of obvious.”  


“Yeah,” said Will. “Yeah, I destroyed some childish things then. Probably not enough, though. I think I missed one thing.”  


Mike, apparently, had no idea what to say, so Will continued.  


“You told me that it wasn’t your fault that I didn’t like girls,” he said. “And now you’ve forgotten that you even said that in the first place.”  


“I hadn’t forgotten,” said Mike, an urgent tone in his voice, “but I didn’t think that that was the main thing. I’m obviously really sorry for that, as well –“  


“Save it, Mike,” said Will. “I’m going to go and climb a tree, like a kid. And hang out with my friends, who are the people that I feel comfortable with and the people who aren’t horrible to me. I’m going to play board games with them, like a kid, and have a sleepover tonight, like a kid. And I’ll be friends with you too, I guess, because I like you. But I’m done with following you around and looking at you in awe. I’m done with the whole unconditional-adoration thing. That’s for kids. And I think that’s one last thing for me to destroy if I’m ever going to grow up.”  


And, without waiting for a response, Will Byers stood up and walked away from the log and from his best friend, not looking back. The noise that it made when he hauled himself up onto one of the lower branches of the tree, the slight snapping of wood under his feet as he climbed higher and higher, sounded nothing like a childhood den being smashed to pieces, but it reminded him of that all the same.  


*******  


**Date unknown:**  


Jim Hopper had stopped marking the days by now.  


He’d once religiously kept a tally on one of the walls with what he dearly hoped was a piece of chalk, and suspected was something far more unpleasant, but – after passing the hundred-and-eighth day – it had lost its appeal. That was around the time when he’d stopped imagining about what he would do if he got out of this place as well, and the two were linked; a tally of days, after all, was only useful if he ever had anyone else to show it to, besides one of the Demo-creatures that stalked the woods and the town. And, as he was starting to suspect, that was not going to happen, perhaps ever.  


Sometimes he hoped that he would never return. The sheer awkwardness of the reunions, he imagined, would be bad enough; there’s never a good way to tell people that you hadn’t died after all. But that was secondary to the other factor, of course – that if a Gate somehow opened, if he somehow found a way to return home, then he surely wouldn’t be the only thing wanting to get through. The Mind Flayer had almost destroyed the whole lot of them, last time, and he was not optimistic about their chances again.  


Not that he had seen the Mind Flayer, of course. It remained stubbornly and yet mercifully elsewhere, and it was unclear quite where it might have disappeared to. But that was the thing about the Upside-Down – it was exactly as large as the real world, the Right-Way-Up or whatever the kids would call it, and there would be a lot of places for it to hide. The dimension was a lot larger than just the town of Hawkins.  


But he tried not to think about this, just as he tried not to think about so many other things. The families whose parents and children had been melted into that creature. The look on Joyce’s face when she had closed the Gate. El.  


And he was doing really rather well at this campaign of avoidance and evasion, until the day the visions began.  


He woke up from a dreamworld that had become as dark as the one he inhabited in waking hours, and began the day’s work. A new trap would be constructed today, he decided; he had the materials, and the expertise in guerrilla warfare that he had been taught by example in the forests of Vietnam. He winced his way through a singularly unappealing breakfast – the cans of food were generally unlabelled, and this one contained hardened and strange-tasting kidney beans in a purple brine, but there was a time and a place for pickiness, and both of them were in a different dimension. And, as he was selecting his tools – the gun, of course, and an axe to sling over his back as he worked – he heard her.  


At first, he assumed that it was his imagination. It would not be the first time he had imagined her voice, after all; there had been long periods of time when he had sat at home and tortured himself with thoughts of it. But after the second and the third instances of her calling to him, he could not help himself, and turned around to see if he could see where the sound might be coming from.  


And there she stood, in the centre of his fortress home. Sarah Hopper. His daughter.  


“Hi, daddy,” she said. She had not aged by a day.  


He said nothing. It would have been difficult to force words out even if he had any.  


“I missed you,” she said, once it had become clear that no reply was forthcoming.  


“I miss you too,” said Hopper, his voice hollow and dry at once. “But you’re not real. You’re not really here.”  


She jutted her chin up at him defiantly, just as her mother had always done, just as she had been learning to do before the sickness. “I am too. Course I’m real.”  


“You’re not, though,” said Hopper, suddenly as weary as if it were the end of the day already. “You can’t be here. Nobody else is here. And especially not you, because…”  


He trailed off, but Sarah seemed to know what he was going to say. “Because I died?”  


Hopper nodded, and looked away.  


“But I didn’t,” she said. “Look. I’m right here.”  


Hopper just shook his head. “This isn’t my first hallucination, you know. I’m not going to believe the things I see if they don’t make sense.”  


“Daddy,” said Sarah, her voice certain, “we’re in a world full of monsters. Nothing about this place makes sense. Why not me too?”  


“Because I remember you dying,” Hopper replied, as he turned his face to the floor. “I remember every single detail of it. I remember every second. The white walls, and the faces of the doctors, and the machines and medicines they brought. The clock that kept ticking like it was laughing at me, the chairs in the waiting-room that felt like a betrayal every time I sat on them, the way the blood in my veins turned to poison when the line on that thing went flat." He looked up now, staring into her eyes, her perfect eyes. "I am never going to forget any of that. So don’t you pretend, don’t you dare pretend, that it never happened. You died.”  


There was a silence in the cabin. Hopper did not move, staring at the thing that looked like his daughter, and she stared back at him.  


“I died,” she finally said.  


Hopper nodded.  


“I died,” she continued, “and so did you.”  


“No, that’s not true –“ Hopper began, but she cut him off.  


“This is where the dead things go,” she said. “This is what happens to us. We go to this dark place, where nothing makes sense and the world is turned against us. I came here a long time ago, and I knew you’d join me eventually, and now you have.”  


She walked around the cabin, pacing in the way she had always paced when it was raining and she was bored at home.  


“You died when they closed the Gate,” she explained. “They turned the keys and the machine blew up, and it killed you, turned you to ash like it turned all of the others. They had to bury an empty casket because nobody knew which ashes were which. And then your immortal soul came here, to the afterlife. It’s not like you always told me it would be, you know. There’s no clouds or rainbows or funhouses full of puppy-dogs. There’s just the dark, and the monsters.”  


And she paused, and looked at him with the sincerity of a seven-year-old child.  


“But I’ve got you now, daddy. You’re here to keep me safe from them.”  


And the tears began to fall freely from the frozen face of Jim Hopper, making pockmarks in the dark dust on his floor, as he watched his daughter stretch her arm out, extending her hand so that he would take it, and he said, “No.”  


“Daddy?” she said, confusion in her voice.  


“No,” he repeated, through a throat blocked up with emotion and mucus. “I’m not dead. You’re not here. I’m not dead. You’re not here. I’m not dead. You’re not here. I’m not dead…”  


He came to his senses an unknown time later, his throat dry and his eyes stinging, lying on the dust-covered floor of his cabin. The room was empty apart from him.  


*******  


**Saturday 4th January, 1986:**  


It was time to return to Hawkins at last, after a week and a few days, and Max was not ready in the slightest.  


Not in terms of her packing, of course. That had been completed around ten minutes after Joyce had made her way into the living room to apologetically remind them that the bus would be leaving Winterton shortly; she was nothing if not efficient and prepared, and had taken care not to leave her belongings strewn around the house (as Dustin apparently had). But the prospect of being dragged away from a warm and comfortable place like this, where she could spend time with her friends whenever she wanted, and did not have to spend mealtimes biting her tongue in self-restraint – well, that was the issue. It had been a blessed span of time, being able to trade Neil’s simmering anger for Lucas and El and the others; but it was over now, and Max was not ready.  


“You’re quiet,” said El, who was sitting on the corner of her bed, watching Max as she stared in the vague direction of her bags.  


Max nodded. “Yeah. Just don’t really want to leave.”  


El smiled. “I’ll get Joyce. You can tell her. You can stay here if you want.”  


Max was unable to resist smiling as well, but it was more cynical than her friend’s smile could ever be. “That’d be nice. But I have to go back. For school and stuff. And for my mom.”  


El swung herself down from the bed, and looked Max dead in the eyes. “You’re scared.”  


Max let out a snort of amusement. “Me? I don’t get scared, El. I’m fine.”  


“Not for you. For her.”  


She had nothing to say in response to that.  


“Neil is a bad man,” said El, in a matter-of-fact tone. “I saw him. How he used to be. And I’ve seen him since, in the summer. He likes hurting people. He likes controlling them.”  


“Yeah,” said Max, turning away, unable to control the biting note of anger in her voice. “I know. But I can’t run away from him.”  


It looked as though El was about to say something else, but at that point, Joyce knocked on the ajar door.  


“Everything alright?” she asked.  


Max nodded quickly. “All packed. Are we going now?”  


“In a few minutes,” Joyce replied. “I’ll run you down to the bus station in town. Have you got your tickets?”  


Max nodded. Joyce turned to go, and then apparently thought better of it, and faced the girls again.  


“I heard some of what you were saying,” she said, quieter this time. “And, Max, if you ever need somewhere to stay, somewhere to hide, you’d be very welcome here. Any time you need it.”  


“I know,” Max replied. “And thanks. But that’s not the point.” She rose to her feet. “For one thing, you’re hundreds of miles away; I can just go hide with Lucas if I have to. Also, I can’t leave Mom there with him. And, anyway, I don’t run away from things.”  


“I’m just saying,” said Joyce. “I know what it can be like, in a house like that. With a man like that. Lonnie, he was never quite that bad, but he had his moments, and my dad…”  


She trailed off. A silence descended.  


“I’m not running away,” repeated Max again, but it had lost its sting this time, as she made her way to the door.  


The bus journey was less fun this time, predictably. The goodbyes had lasted for a good fifteen minutes, and would have continued for longer had the driver not irritably sounded his horn and forced them to board immediately or be left behind; and once the bus had pulled out of the small station in Winterton, a melancholy mood quickly descended over the four of them.  


“Well,” said Dustin, with forced levity, “not too long until Easter. Maybe they’ll even come over sooner. Who knows?”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, quietly, looking out of the window at the passing fields and trees, into the setting sun. “Maybe.”  


“You alright, Mike?” asked Lucas.  


“Not really, Lucas,” Mike responded. Once it would have been cutting and sarcastic; now, it seemed as though Mike lacked the energy to try for that. “I’m not going to see my girlfriend for a few months, and my oldest friend –“ He stopped there, for some reason.  


Max just sat there, thinking. She’d noticed that something had happened between Mike and Will a few days ago; the two had barely spoken, despite what appeared to be Mike’s best efforts, with Will always managing to skilfully divert the conversation onto different tracks when such a thing seemed likely.  


She asked Lucas about it around half an hour later, when it seemed like she could get away with it under the cover of Dustin and Mike’s half-hearted debate about Ewoks and guerrilla warfare.  


“No idea,” said Lucas, shrugging. “I noticed as well. Figured it was something Mike had said. It normally is.”  


“Yeah, but what?”  


Another shrug. “Neither of them would ever say. It was like that in the summer, too; we never knew what had happened there, did we? When Will destroyed the fort? I mean, sure, we had other things on our mind, but…”  


Max nodded, trying not to think of what one of those other things had been. Billy’s birthday would have been in a few weeks, and it didn’t quite sting too much any more, but it was still something she couldn’t entirely ignore.  


So she put her head on Lucas’s shoulder, disregarding the fact that it was not an entirely comfortable angle, and closed her eyes as he began to read.  


She opened them again to bright streetlights, and Lucas shaking her gently.  


“We’ve made it to Richmond,” he said. “Time to change buses. You can sleep on the next one.”  


But the next bus was full, almost, and the driver – himself apparently half-asleep, with a huge cup of coffee balanced precariously on the dashboard – seemed somewhat sceptical about letting four unsupervised teenagers on board. Max watched as Lucas and Dustin turned to Mike, apparently expecting him to deal with the situation, but he just stood in confusion, and so Dustin stepped up to the plate, displaying their tickets and promising that they were just on the way back home after visiting friends, until the driver finally acquiesced and allowed them to board, muttering under his breath as he did so.  


None of the four remaining seats were next to each other, and Max silently cursed the people who had stolen her reserved place, whilst knowing that she was far too tired to do anything about it. Dustin and Lucas, as the first ones on, took the seats nearer the front, both next to slumbering young men, and Mike and Max made their way towards the back.  


“Here,” Mike muttered to Max, gesturing to one of the unoccupied places, next to an old woman absorbed in her knitting. “You take this one. I’ll take the one with the guy behind this.”  


Max hesitated for a split second, then nodded in gratitude, and settled into her seat. She had been somewhat wary about the other man, and wondered slightly whether Mike had noticed. But she did not consider it for too long, for – after answering the old woman’s friendly questions as politely and briefly as possible – she was asleep again.  


She woke some indeterminate time later. It was pitch-black outside the bus, with no streetlights; by the winding of the road, she guessed that they were up in the mountains. She looked around the bus, trying to see Lucas and Dustin in the front, but they appeared to be dead to the world. Then she turned around, and received a sudden shock to see Mike looking directly at her.  


“What the hell are you doing?” she asked. “Why aren’t you asleep?”  


“Couldn’t,” said Mike, his tone dull with fatigue. “You?”  


“Just woke up,” she said. “Where are we?”  


Mike shrugged. “No idea. Somewhere in the Appalachians. Think it’s around half past three.”  


He turned to look out of the window into the darkness, and then turned back suddenly, as if having received an electric shock. “Max. Look out there.”  


“It’s fucking dark, Wheeler,” she replied. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”  


“Just do it,” he hissed, and she wasn’t sure whether he was serious, but looked anyway, and – as her eyes adjusted to the night – she saw the faintest hint of a dark shape, keeping pace with the bus, back in the trees.  


She turned back to him. “What is it?”  


Mike shook his head, his expression one of wary confusion. “It’s following us.”  


“Just a shadow?”  


“Maybe. But there’s no moonlight.”  


“Do you think –“  


And, as she looked out again, she saw the shape growing in size as it rushed towards the side of the bus, still formless, but not swerving or slowing –  


And then there was a crash, an almighty, terrible noise, and a bright light from the alarms and hazard lights, and the driver was shouting in panic, and the side of the vehicle three rows in front of Max buckled as the bus itself began to tilt away from the impact, and then they were falling –

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yep, here comes the plot. Only took us twenty thousand words to get there.
> 
> If you enjoyed this, or have any thoughts on the story so far, please do leave a comment to that effect! I like attention!


	4. Everything Right Is Wrong Again

The bus hit the road, and there was chaos.  


Emergency lights were flaring everywhere, and all the passengers had woken up by this point, yelling in incomprehension and fear. There was a smell of smoke in the air, although it was unclear where this was coming from, and around halfway down the right-hand side, a gaping and jagged hole had opened up in the side of the vehicle, through which the freezing mountain air was pouring in. Of the thing that had attacked the bus, there was no sign.  


Mike opened his eyes, having closed them in automatic terror, and realised with shock that he was suspended parallel to the road, the bus lying on its side. He was being held in his seat purely by the seatbelt, which he was suddenly fervently thankful for having remembered to put on, and was leaning inadvertently on the man next to him, who had appeared somewhat intimidating at the bus station in Richmond but now seemed just as confused and afraid as the rest of them. He craned his neck to try and find Dustin and Lucas, but could not; Max, in front of him, was evidently doing the same.  


“Everyone out!” a voice was shouting, and Mike decided to follow this advice.  


Holding onto the seat in front of him, he slowly unclipped his seatbelt, and lowered himself over his neighbour onto the sides of the seats across the aisle; from there, it was a small drop to the window which now rested on the floor. A second later, Max landed heavily next to him, having foregone the intermediate step and just jumped from her seat. The two of them looked at each other for a brief, lost, half-second, before the old woman who had been next to Max started calling for help, and they both climbed up to the aisle to ease her down. And then it was out, along the windows and through the sunroof, which had been broken open by somebody and was now serving as an emergency exit for the forty or fifty terrified passengers.  


As they made their way out onto the road, with the air biting at their exposed skin, Dustin and Lucas were still nowhere to be seen; Mike thought he caught a glimpse of Dustin’s cap still inside the bus, but he could not see whether it was attached to his friend’s head or not. The snow on the ground, at the sides of the road, was about half a foot deep, and there was a frost on the tarmac that the road-salt had not quite driven away. And then, all of a sudden, the whole scene was illuminated by far more than the blinking lights on the crashed bus, as a flare lit up the night sky.  


People were running away from the bus, both directions down the road, apparently for fear that it would for some reason explode, and Mike and Max were carried along with the crowd, until it had dispersed enough for them to stop and take stock of the situation.  


“Lucas!” Max yelled. “Lucas! Dustin! Over here! We’re over here!” Mike joined his own voice to hers, also calling for their friends, but there was little hope of attracting anyone’s attention over the whistling of the cold wind. Eventually, they fell silent, wrapping their hands into their coats, and again stared at each other, wordless.  


Finally, Max broke the silence, and said, quite calmly given the circumstances, “What the fuck just happened.”  


Mike shook his head. “I saw the same as you. Something huge. It just charged at the bus and knocked it over, and made that huge hole.”  


“What was it?” asked Max. “A bear? Do they get that big?”  


“Don’t think so. And definitely not that strong. And why did it attack the bus?”  


Max shrugged, trying not to shiver. Mike looked at her, and she looked at him, and he could tell that they were both thinking the same thoughts.  


“It’s us again, isn’t it,” said Max. It was not a question, but Mike nodded anyway.  


*******  


Lucas found Dustin in the middle of the crowd, hatless and coughing in the freezing air.  


“Mike and Max?” said Dustin.  


Lucas shook his head. “They were at the back. Probably further down the road.” He pointed to the other crowd that had formed on the other side of the wreck of the bus, faintly visible under the shimmering light of the flare.  


The two of them remained standing there for around five minutes, only exchanging words when necessary, or periodically reassuring one another that the emergency services would surely be on their way soon. Some of the people surrounding them were talking about trying to get back onto the bus, but nobody seemed particularly inclined to venture too close to it (despite Dustin’s muttered remarks that ‘gas tanks don’t just explode, seriously, people, come on’). Lucas, too, was beginning to sympathise with them; the air was biting at his skin even through the large coat he had had the presence of mind to cover himself with before leaving his seat, and he was finding it difficult not to keep scanning the treeline. A few of the other people in the crowd had been muttering about some creature attacking the bus, which did not seem likely – drivers lost control of vehicles all the time on frosty roads like this, Lucas knew – but the paranoia was hard to suppress. It had, after all, served a good purpose before.  


“Look!” shouted someone anonymous in the crowd. “Lights down the road! It’s the fire department!”  


A ragged cheer rose from the group, but Lucas did not join it, for something seemed wrong. The fire department, surely, could not have arrived so quickly; they could not be that close to an emergency response team. And, as the vehicles bearing the lights drew closer, it slowly dawned on him that his instincts had not been unreliable here.  


“Dustin,” he hissed, turning to his friend. “Get back. We need to hide.”  


Dustin turned, a retort on his lips, but he was silenced by the intensity of Lucas’s glare, and the two of them slowly, surreptitiously, made their way to the back of the crowd, not far from the edge of the road and the forest.  


“What is it?” whispered Dustin.  


“Military vehicles,” replied Lucas. “Army trucks or something. Like the ones that turned up at Starcourt in July.”  


“You think there’s something wrong?”  


Lucas hesitated, then nodded. “It’s too fast. And there’s no harm in keeping a low profile until everything looks like it’s above board.”  


Dustin nodded, pulling his coat tighter around himself, and shuffling back even further, into the trees. Lucas followed him.  


They watched as the soldiers jumped down from their trucks and began rounding the people up, moving amongst them with reassuring words. Some made their way over to the bus, checking it over and eventually pronouncing it safe to return to for those who had left their possessions on board. It seemed normal, it seemed safe. And yet…  


“There,” whispered Lucas to Dustin, nudging his friend in the ribs and pointing. “Towards the back. They’re moving two figures away from the rest of the group. That’s not right.”  


Although he was not watching Dustin’s face, Lucas heard the sharp intake of breath. “Two figures. Oh my god, Lucas, it’s them, isn’t it? Mike and Max?”  


The blood, which was already running cold in Lucas’s veins from fear and winter, froze slightly more. “Can’t see from here. I’m going to get a better look.”  


Ignoring Dustin’s whispered protests, Lucas tiptoed towards the soldiers, taking care to hide behind the trees whenever possible. Finally, he made it to a slight rise, from where he could look down upon the road, and he saw – just for a second, before the door of the truck slammed shut – red hair and pale skin, and the blue coat Mike had been wearing. It was probably just his imagination, but he could have sworn that he could hear Max shouting, and then abruptly, terrifyingly, falling silent, before the truck – unnoticed by the crowds – drove hastily away.  


“What is it?” said Dustin, materialising behind him. “Can you see?”  


Lucas turned. “It’s them. The soldiers took them. Dustin, they took them.”  


*******  


The bus was an hour later into the bus station at Hawkins, by which time Steve had been worrying for a solid thirty minutes, and it quickly became clear that he had been right to worry. The children – all four of them – were nowhere to be seen.  


“Hey!” he shouted, running inelegantly from his car to the front of the bus over the icy tarmac. “What happened to the kids?”  


The driver, who had been closing the door behind the last passenger boarding, halted, and regarded Steve with suspicion. “What the hell are you on about, boy?”  


“There were supposed to be four kids on this bus,” Steve explained. “Coming back from Virginia. Where are they?”  


The driver shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I only drive from here to Louisville and back. No kids got on my bus this morning.”  


Steve was shivering, but he did not notice the cold, for a far more concerning thought was dawning on him. “How do I find out where they’ve gone?”  


“Phone the depot,” the driver suggested. “Someone in Louisville might know something.” He paused, squinting in thought. “Did you say Virginia?”  


Steve nodded.  


“I only ask,” the driver continued, infuriatingly unhurriedly, “since the overnight from Richmond, Virginia was delayed by a good hour this morning. That’s why we were late getting here; we were waiting for them to show up.”  


With that, he hoisted himself up the steps and began to close the door again.  


“Wait!” Steve shouted. “Can’t you give me more help than this?”  


The driver shrugged. “Not much I can do, kid. I’ve got to drive this thing. Already behind schedule enough as it is.”  


He closed the door. Steve swore several times, but it did nothing to prevent the bus from pulling out of the station and departing.  


From the station, it was only a five-minute drive to Robin’s house, which Steve managed – despite the slippery roads – in two. He rang the doorbell, waited, rang it again, waited a little longer, then rang it four times in a fit of pique. Just as he was beginning to entertain fears that, somehow, Robin had disappeared as well, had been taken by the same forces that had taken the children, the door swung open, revealing her pyjama-clad form slumping against the wall on the other side.  


“Harrington,” she said, her voice flat and dangerous. “It is a Sunday morning. It is not yet eight o’clock. It is not a day when we have work; it is a day when I have the privilege of getting to spend my morning in bed, asleep, not having to deal with you. Would you care to explain yourself, or shall I just rip your precious hair out by the roots now and get it over with?”  


“They’ve been taken, Robin,” said Steve. “All of them.”  


“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.  


“The kids. They were supposed to be getting back this morning on the bus. They weren’t there.”  


Robin breathed in sharply, glanced around, and stepped back slightly, beckoning him in.  


“I need to use your phone,” said Steve.  


“What’s wrong with yours?”  


Steve shook his head. “My parents are home at the moment. Too much trouble to explain.”  


“I also have parents, moron –” Robin began, but Steve was not listening, making his way to the phone and beginning to dial a number that he had memorised over the last few months.  


“Hello?” came a tired yet suspicious voice from the other end. “Who’s this?”  


“It’s Steve,” said Steve, quickly, “sorry to wake you up, Mrs Byers, but did the kids leave yesterday evening?”  


“Oh, hello there, Steve,” Joyce replied, sounding somewhat more relaxed with the knowledge that the caller was someone familiar. “I took them to the bus station at around five yesterday. What’s wrong?”  


“They weren’t on the bus this morning,” said Steve. “I’m going to check with the depot in Louisville, but –“  


“Steve,” said Joyce, interrupting, “stop talking now, and get off the line. Keep me updated through other channels. Good luck.”  


With a click, the line went dead. Steve frowned at the phone.  


“What is it?” asked Robin.  


“Mrs Byers hung up on me,” Steve replied. “She’s normally a lot more polite than that. And what the hell are these other channels?”  


Robin’s eyes widened in realisation. “She probably thinks the line’s being bugged.”  


Steve blinked. “Would it be?”  


Robin nodded, her expression uncommonly serious. “You know they bug everyone’s phones, right? The government?”  


Steve returned the phone to its cradle, heavily, and ran both of his hands through his hair absently until Robin flicked his arm to make him stop.  


“What are we going to do?” he asked.  


“Call the depot,” Robin suggested. “They already know you’re going to do that, and maybe it’s just an honest mistake, not…” She tailed off, but the words ‘Upside-Down’ were nonetheless clear from her tone.  


But the person answering the phone at the depot had nothing to say either, only telling Steve that the children were logged as passengers on the overnight journey from Richmond to Louisville, and must have just failed to get on the right bus. Somehow, Steve doubted that any group containing Dustin would have made this mistake.  


“Other channels, then?” said Robin, once Steve had hung up politely and then launched a tirade of abuse at the dead line.  


He looked at her, a slightly wild look in his eyes. “What the hell are these other channels? How are we supposed to talk to Mrs Byers and tell her what’s going on without going through the bugged phones?”  


“Isn’t it obvious?” said Robin. “We need to use their little pocket radio things and Dustin’s magic tower. Will and El should be able to pick up on the other end, and we might even be able to get through to the kids, if they’ve got theirs on them.”  


Steve bit his lip in unconscious worry, and then nodded. “OK. But I don’t have one of their radios. They wouldn’t give me one. Mike said it would be like having his mom on the channel, listening to what they were saying.” These last two sentences were delivered in a tone of genuine offence.  


“Would all of them have brought theirs with them?”  


“Dustin, Lucas, and Mike definitely would. They’re like some kind of nerd security blanket or something. Not sure about Max – should we check her house?”  


Robin shook her head. “That’s called breaking and entering, dumbass. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to resort to a life of crime here.”  


“Where do we get another one? It’s Sunday morning – won’t all the shops be closed?”  


“Doesn’t matter,” said Robin. “There’s another weird child in town still, and I know for a fact that she’s got a secret radio that the others don’t know about. And I know where we can find her.”  


The realisation dawned on Steve after a few seconds later, and he lowered his head to rest on the kitchen counter in despair. “Oh, god, no. Please, not Erica.”  


*******  


“Who were you talking to?” asked El, a tone of curiosity in her voice. Joyce jumped.  


“Sorry, El, dear, I didn’t realise you were there,” she said, turning around to face El. “That was Steve.”  


“Why was he phoning us this early?”  


Joyce hesitated, and then said, “Oh, he was just checking that everything had gone smoothly yesterday. He’s still waiting for the bus to arrive at the moment.”  


El nodded. Joyce seemed distracted, as though she was thinking about something else, but then, she often seemed like that. Shrugging to herself, El wandered through to the kitchen to fetch herself some breakfast; Will was sitting at the table, staring into space over a cold stack of toast.  


“Hi, Will,” she said. “How did you sleep?”  


Will blinked and turned to her. “Not too bad, thanks. Quieter with everyone gone.”  


El tilted her head. Will seemed to know what she meant.  


“I guess I don’t really miss them yet,” he said. “I think you miss people more once you’re a few weeks in, rather than immediately after they’ve gone. I don’t know.”  


He turned his eyes back to his toast, took a bite, grimaced at the discovery that it had gone cold, and took another, larger bite.  


“Will?” said El.  


“Yeah?”  


“Why don’t you like Mike any more?”  


This question came just as Will was swallowing another piece of toast, and he began to choke, waving away El’s concern and returning to normal just as Joyce poked her head around the door with a look of confusion. After a moment, he said, in a carefully neutral voice, “What do you mean?”  


“Well,” said El, “you weren’t talking to him in the last couple of days. When he tried to talk to you, you always got someone else to come over and join the conversation. And you didn’t say goodbye to him yesterday evening, like you did to everyone else. You just waved.”  


Will looked somewhat mutinous, but then his expression smoothed slightly, and he pursed his lips. “That obvious?”  


El nodded. Inwardly, she was delighted that she had been able to successfully read enough social cues to work something complicated like this out, but something told her that Will would not quite understand, and would possibly not be in the mood to congratulate her about this.  


“Look,” said Will, “it’s nothing really. He just said something that annoyed me.”  


“Will, friends don’t –”  


“I know they don’t,” said Will, cutting El off. “But I don’t think I really want to talk about it. Not right now.”  


El nodded. There was a long silence, broken only by the sounds of Joyce moving things around in another room.  


“Does this mean that you don’t like me either?” she finally asked.  


A look of extreme confusion crossed Will’s face, and then he stood up. “Do you want to go for a walk?” he said.  


El was confused, but she knew that people sometimes said things that seemed like they were changing the subject, only to then return to it again. She nodded, and the two of them made their way through to the porch, where they donned shoes and coats.  


“Mom, we’re going out for a walk,” said Will at his maximum volume, which was around the same as Dustin’s normal speaking voice. “We’ll be back for lunch.”  


There was no reply, which generally meant that things were fine. The two of them stepped out onto the empty drive – Jonathan and Nancy had left early in the morning to drive north because of schools or something like that – and began to walk.  


Behind them, unnoticed by anyone, a light in the new Byers house began to flicker uncertainly.  


“Why would you think that I wouldn’t like you?” said Will, curiously, as they walked towards Winterton.  


El said nothing for a minute or so, trying to put her thoughts into words. Will was good at not rushing her when this was the case, when she was trying to translate between her own personal thought-language and spoken English. They had reached the end of the road, turning left at the junction towards town, before she worked out what to say.  


“When people don’t like other people,” she said, slowly, “they also don’t like the people that those people like. And I like Mike, so do you not like me as well, because I like him?”  


Will was silent for a moment, then he said, “It’s not really that simple, though. That’s not really how it works.”  


“What do you mean?”  


“It’s possible to like someone but not like all of their friends,” explained Will. “Or to dislike someone, but have a friend in common. You don’t have to like everyone that your friends are friends with as well.”  


El nodded faintly. They crossed the bridge over the small stream that ran between Winterton and their house.  


“Look,” said Will, “didn’t you use to not like Max? Even though Lucas liked her, and Lucas was your friend?”  


El shook her head. “I didn’t not like Max. I was scared of her.”  


Will blinked in confusion. “Isn’t that the same?”  


El shook her head, and opened her mouth to explain something that seemed very clear in her head, but all of a sudden, Will was holding up his finger in warning, a look of fear on his face.  


“There’s someone following us,” he whispered. “Right down at the other end of the road. They’re looking away, but I swear they’ve been following us, keeping their distance. I just saw them looking at us, and then turn away.”  


And the fear was back, back like it had never gone away, like it was still 1983 and she was hiding in the back of a restaurant. El turned to Will, and said, “Run.”  


*******  


The base lay a few kilometres downstream from the town of Klyuchi, nestled deep within the forests and mountains of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was ringed with security, inside and out; cameras were on at all times, observing both the concrete corridors of the underground base and the landmine-filled woodlands with equal alacrity. Around three out of every four residents of the base were armed guards, soldiers who had been headhunted from the regular Red Army in recognition of their abilities to deal with the unexpected, and their patrols were both irregular and constant. The only way in or out was a rough dirt track which made its way up the river, weaving in and out of the jagged rockfaces which covered the landscape, which provided access to a town of around ten thousand miners; from there, it was another four hundred kilometres to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, which itself had a good claim to be the most remote city in the USSR.  


Nikolay Andreyevich Palenko had never felt so glad to be back.  


He, and his fellow detainees, had been placed immediately into quarantine chambers – spartan, bare cells, with their lack of comfort reflecting not malice but merely a plain and simple cost-cutting utilitarianism – upon their arrival at Klyuchi ten days earlier, with the commanders of the base apparently having decided that they would not have put it past the Americans to try and smuggle some kind of biological agent into the Soviet Union. Although they had been allowed to interact with one another, they had been isolated from the rest of the base, which meant that Nikolay was still just as in the dark about its purpose as he had been when he had arrived. Dr Ignat’ev had apologetically evaded his inquiries whenever he asked, and Nikolay had soon learned to stop asking; the most he had found out from the older man was that he had worked here prior to his trip to Hawkins, for around a year. The same was true of the other scientists, and at least a few of the military men, who had been captured after the American raid on the Cathedral beneath that small town; Boris Dmitriyevich Gorikhin, the Odessan scientist, had mentioned to Nikolay in a somewhat hushed tone that he’d been invited to work here a couple of weeks after his PhD in theoretical physics had been completed, and had been required to sign all manner of non-disclosure forms. Gorikhin’s family, apparently, thought that he was working as a post-doctoral student in Omsk (he had been instructed to send letters maintaining the ruse), whilst a Kazakh colleague of his claimed that the authorities had seen fit to fake his death so that they could transfer him to Klyuchi and then to Hawkins. But, still, nobody would tell Nikolay exactly what they had been doing here.  


A few of the others were like Nikolay, standard-issue spies who had no idea what was going on but had been brought along with the Cathedral team. Nikolay wasn’t sure if Vosemov was one of them or not; the tall, muscular soldier did not talk, but merely stood in the corner of the large room where socialising was permitted, staring intently at everyone who walked past. Nikolay had tried, several times, to start up a conversation, but to no avail.  


But that was not the main thing on his mind any more, for the quarantine period had ended, and their medical tests had been completed, pronouncing the whole contingent fit to enter the base. Nikolay waited in the room with everyone else, chatting idly with a couple of the others and trying to steer clear of the dead-eyed Ozerov without making it obvious that this was what he was doing, until the door to the rest of the base swung open, and a group of guards ushered them through.  


They were brought along a confusing maze of corridors and tunnels, plunging deeper and deeper into the earth beneath the Kamchatkan mountains, and eventually emerged into what seemed like some kind of lecture theatre. Once everyone had taken their seats – Nikolay noticed Vosemov taking care to sit at the end, and mentally filed this as another peculiarity about the blond soldier – the lights were lowered, and a man wearing a general’s uniform stepped out onto the stage at the front.  


“Good afternoon, comrades,” he said, in a voice that projected power. “Welcome home to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My name is General Yuri Vladimirovich Stepanov, and I am in command of this base. As of this minute, you answer to me above any other authority, up to and including the General Secretary himself.”  


Stepanov paused for effect. It worked, for Nikolay at least; either Stepanov was prone to hyperbole, or the Klyuchi base was far from being just a random military facility.  


“The Soviet Union, and the Soviet citizen, thanks each and every one of you for your service,” Stepanov continued, sounding not particularly grateful. “To those of you who served in the Cathedral, I have this to say: whilst we have suffered a not inconsiderable setback at the hands of the imperialists, our work continues and cannot be halted. Indeed, since you were deployed, we have already made a number of technical improvements to our experiments, and with the help of material extracted from the Cathedral, have successfully constructed a small-scale stable Gate here in Klyuchi.”  


Although Nikolay had no idea what this meant, it provoked quite the reaction from the scientists; Gorikhin audibly gasped, whilst Ignat’ev’s eyes widened even as his expression remained studiously neutral. Stepanov allowed himself a small, thin smile.  


“To the eight of you who were engaged in other projects,” he said, looking directly at Nikolay for a moment, “this is no longer the case, and you are now operatives for Project Nutcracker. This base is now your home for the foreseeable future, due to the extremely classified nature of this project. Put simply, Project Nutcracker is an attempt to gain access to alternate dimensions, which has so far been largely successful.”  


Stepanov’s pause was shorter this time, but it was just long enough for the full significance of his words to dawn upon Nikolay. He was vaguely aware, in some distant corner of his brain, that his mouth was hanging open like a puppet, but this was not an immediate concern, for the rest of his mind was processing Stepanov’s words.  


He had never read a great deal of science fiction. This was beginning to seem like an oversight on his part.  


Stepanov continued talking. “We estimate that a full-scale Gate between our dimension and another will be achieved within the next week, with the successful construction of a Dzhankoi Passageway and the solution through new computational methods of the Leontiev-Hamaalin equations necessary to permit stable quark-antiquark interaction. When this is complete, it will be our job to explore and gain a full understanding of the dimension beyond, and to assess its value for the Soviet Union.”  


As they filed out of the lecture theatre, Nikolay’s mind was still in a haze, attempting to come to terms with the relatively casual revelation that not only did alternate dimensions exist, but that he was to be one of the first humans allowed into one. At least, he presumed that there would be no humans there; from what Stepanov had said, and from the nearby mutterings of Gorikhin about atmospheric conditions, he assumed that this was not going to be a carbon copy of Earth, but something stranger.  


“Everything alright?” came the kindly voice of Ignat’ev behind Nikolay, in a tone which suggested that it was not the first time he had asked. Nikolay shook his head like a dog trying to get water out of its ears, and turned to the older scientist.  


“Fine,” he said, “sorry. Just a lot to take in there.”  


“You see now why I couldn’t tell you about it?” said Ignat’ev.  


Nikolay nodded. “I suppose, as top-secret projects go, this one had a fairly good reason to stay secret. Imagine what the Western press would do with this if they knew.”  


“The Americans had their own project too, you know,” said Ignat’ev. “The Cathedral was building on their work, in a way. I was the second-in-command of the science crowd there, under Alexey – sorry, Dr Stavropol’skiy – but he went missing just before the attack on the base, so I assume that the Americans got to him somehow.”  


“How advanced are they?” asked Nikolay. “Have they made a Gate as well?”  


“They had one, but it was shut down somehow,” said Ignat’ev. “We’re a bit in the dark about the exact details; presumably, they got the equations wrong somehow, or just built a machine that didn’t work quite as well as they intended.” He opened a door, and ushered Nikolay through. “This is it, by the way, if you’re curious.”  


The room before him was massive, easily able to fit an aeroplane or two into it, and was full of people, but Nikolay only had eyes for one thing. On the wall opposite him, behind a large fence and a strange glass chamber, a great spreading mass of flickering red light danced and pulsated, fed by what appeared to be a large laser. At the exact centre, where the laser hit the wall, there was an inexplicable darkness amidst the light, perhaps the size of the palm of a hand.  


“That’s the Gate?” whispered Nikolay, not taking his eyes off it.  


“That’s the Gate,” said Ignat’ev. “We’re working on getting it larger, and stabilising it so that we don’t have to keep firing that infernal device at it.”  


Nikolay kept staring, transfixed by the light and by the possibilities it represented. He did not seem to be alone in his reverie; Ignat’ev had spoken in the same soft voice, more fit for the interior of a church than a laboratory, and none of the desks in the room faced away from the Gate. Turning one’s back on it would seem wrong, somehow.  


A man walked up to them, with long and elegant grey hair; he was flanked by two extremely heavily-armed guards, but did not seem to be too concerned by their presence.  


“Yermolay, how very pleasant to see you again,” he said to Ignat’ev. His Russian was grammatically correct and confident, but his vowels were oddly enunciated, whilst his accent betrayed his American origins. “And just in time for the grand event, as well. It’s so good that you’ll be here to witness it.”  


Ignat’ev nodded curtly. “You’re still here as well, then? Stepanov hasn’t got rid of you yet?”  


The man smiled. As he did, the light from the portal caught his face, which had been somewhat shadowed, and Nikolay noticed the scars across it, faded but extensive. “Yermolay, we both know that you can’t work from my notes alone. And General Stepanov still believes I have other secrets to reveal, as well.”  


“He should feed you to that thing in the basement,” muttered one of the American’s guards, but this only made the man smile wider. He turned, joining Nikolay and Ignat’ev in their surveying of the portal, and nodded to himself, before walking away, his guards in his wake.  


“Who was that?” asked Nikolay.  


Ignat’ev looked faintly disgusted as he replied. “Some American traitor. He was involved with their programme, but then defected to us in exchange for asylum and rewards, and the promise that he could carry on with some other research which seems to involving torturing children. Stepanov snapped him up in a heartbeat, and he’s been –” he grimaced – “quite useful in helping us to get this far.”  


“You captured him at the Cathedral?”  


Ignat’ev shook his head. “No, he came to us about two years ago now. We’ve been keeping him here at Klyuchi under lock and key; the man’s a psychopath. I just hope that Stepanov doesn’t let him go back to his other research, the experiments on the children, when we’re done with this. I’ve seen his notes, and it’s not good.”  


“What’s his name?” asked Nikolay, out of curiosity more than anything.  


“Martin Brenner.”  


*******  


The forest was darker than any forest had the right to be.  


Dustin and Lucas had been walking for several hours now, as much to keep warm as to get away from the road where the soldiers had taken their friends. It had not taken long to formulate the plan; acting under the assumption that the soldiers would presumably be looking for them as well, the pair of them had agreed that they were not to go back to the road under any circumstances, but would walk roughly parallel to it in the direction that the trucks carrying Mike and Max had gone. Beyond that, it was somewhat unclear.  


They had heard the soldiers patrolling, in the distance, but nonetheless still ominously present. Lucas had told Dustin that the orders being barked faintly through the trees sounded like standard search procedures, and Dustin had utterly failed to distract himself from the implications of this; they were prey, and would remain prey for the foreseeable future. Wherever the soldiers – and there was a part of him that insisted upon thinking of them as ‘the bad men’, remembering those earlier hunts and chases back in 1983 – were based, they had presumably taken Mike and Max there, and would take him and Lucas along as well if they found him. And nothing good could follow from that: if they wanted information, then they would surely torture them; if they wanted hostages, then hostages they would have, and no amount of pleading would stop Joyce and Steve and El from riding in to the rescue, which in turn would be precisely the intended outcome. No, their only hope right now was to somehow slip through the net.  


“Dustin,” said Lucas, in a low voice, “you’re breathing extremely loud.”  


“No, I’m not,” Dustin whispered back, an automatic response.  


“You are. I can hear it from here.”  


“Well, if the soldiers get within two metres of me, then I’ll try and breathe more quietly, then, shall I?” Dustin said.  


A silence fell. They continued walking.  


“We can do this, man,” whispered Lucas.  


“Can we?” Dustin replied. “Like, I don’t know if you noticed, Lucas, but there’s a whole army of these guys, and they’re trained in tracking people.”  


“There’s not an army,” said Lucas. “There’s twenty of them, tops.”  


“Oh, that’s better, we can totally beat them with those odds –”  


“And they’re not trained in tracking,” Lucas continued, ignoring Dustin. “They don’t know what they’re doing; real professionals wouldn’t need to keep shouting to each other. They’re not used to this sort of work.”  


Dustin fell silent for a moment. “Your dad was in the army, wasn’t he?”  


Lucas nodded. “Vietnam, in the last years. He doesn’t tend to talk about it much in the specifics – didn’t exactly want to be there – but he tells us how the army works.”  


“Conscripted?”  


“Just after he’d met Mom.”  


“You might not have been born, then,” said Dustin. “If he’d been unlucky out there.”  


Lucas stopped, looking incredulously at him. “Why would you say something like that?”  


Dustin shrugged. “Because I don’t have anything in the way of filters.”  


“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” said Lucas. “Just a bit weird, you know, talking about your parents dying before you were born.”  


“Yeah, I guess,” said Dustin. “At least my dad was around for a bit, you know.”  


Lucas looked away. “Sorry. Forgot.”  


“That’s OK,” said Dustin, and meant it. “I never really knew him. Just a couple of memories from when I was four, and a few things he left me.”  


They walked for another twenty minutes, uphill all the way, through the blanketing frost. Not for the first time, Dustin thanked whatever strange powers governed his life that it had not snowed that night; they would have been caught within an instant.  


“What do you want to do when you’re older?” asked Lucas eventually, a strange tone in his voice.  


Dustin turned to look at his friend, but could not read him. “So many things,” he said, after a pause in which he gathered his thoughts. “I want to go to college, and study science. Astrophysics, maybe, or robotics, or something cool like that. I want to travel to a hundred different places that aren’t Hawkins. I want to go down to Utah, and find Suzie, and take her away somewhere that we can be ourselves, where there aren’t Mormons and bullies telling us not to be. I want to get a fancy job in a laboratory, and earn enough money that I can live in a big city and keep Mom going when she can’t work any more. I want to walk the Appalachian Trail – well, maybe not this bit of it, I don’t think I’d want to come back to this area any time soon – but do something like that, start in one state and finish in a completely different one. I want to see rockets land on Mars and astronauts to walk on the surface.”  


He paused, and coughed slightly. “But, most of all, I want to stay with you guys. With you, and Mike and Will, and El, and Max, and Steve, and everyone. You’re the best friends I’ve ever had.”  


He ducked his head, his cheeks burning faintly, both with the cold and with a slight embarrassment. When Lucas replied, there was a smirk in his tone. “Are you getting sentimental because we’re being chased by a government death squad?”  


“Shut up, Lucas,” said Dustin. “I’m always like this. I’m an open book. Nobody ever asks me the real questions.”  


Lucas nodded. They kept walking.  


“So what do you want to do?” said Dustin, after a few minutes. The sounds of the soldiers in the valley were growing quieter, although they were not stopping their hunt.  


Lucas was silent for such a long time that Dustin was beginning to wonder whether he had actually spoken out loud, or just thought the question; the adrenaline of fear and pursuit was wearing away, to be replaced with a dull tiredness. Finally, just as he was about to ask again, Lucas said, quietly, “I’m not sure if I know.”  


“What you want to do in the future?”  


“Yeah. Like, obviously, all your stuff about staying friends with you guys, don’t make me repeat all that sappiness. But I don’t know where I want to go.”  


Dustin chewed on his lip contemplatively. “Do you want to go to college?”  


“Maybe,” said Lucas. “If I can afford it. But I don’t know what job I’d want to do.”  


“Well, what are you interested in? You’re good at science too, right? You nearly beat me in that physics test.”  


“Yeah, thanks, way to make a boast sound encouraging,” said Lucas in a wry tone. “But I don’t know if I want to spend my whole life doing stuff like that. Like, sure, it’s OK, and I’m OK at it, but I think I’d prefer to do something else at college. But I know I probably shouldn’t.”  


“What is it?” Dustin asked.  


“Philosophy,” said Lucas, sounding oddly hesitant.  


“Oh. Cool.”  


“No,” said Lucas. “Not cool. You don’t get it, Dustin. There’s no use for me to study philosophy.”  


“Why not?” said Dustin. “They’re not going to turn you away from jobs with a philosophy degree, if it’s a good enough college. You can do politics or journalism or something, or teach, or whatever. Or be a philosopher, if you do enough thinking.”  


“But here’s the thing,” said Lucas. “Those jobs, those things, they’re not for people like me. When you’re black, you don’t get to do the fancy philosophy and shit. If you go to college, it’s for science and math and that sort of stuff; you can’t do politics or philosophy unless you’re DuBois or Martin Luther King or someone like that. ‘Cause if you start doing philosophy when you’re black, you figure out pretty quick that this country doesn’t work for you, and then you end up – well…” He glanced back down the slope, to the distant voices of the soldiers.  


Dustin said nothing, because he had no idea what to say. Cautiously, he edged closer to his friend, and put a consoling arm on his shoulder. Lucas stared flatly at him.  


“You don’t know what you’re doing here, do you?” he asked.  


Dustin shook his head, and withdrew his arm. “No, not really.”  


They walked for another ten minutes. The soldiers kept searching, their voices seeming to become louder again as the two of them approached the ridgeline where the winds carried the sounds of the valley.  


“But you’ve got to start somewhere,” said Dustin, eventually. “Someone’s got to be the one to start getting into the philosophy classes, so everyone else can follow you. And besides, you want to let them stop you? You want to let them win?”  


“They’ve already won,” said Lucas, but his tone of voice, cautiously hopeful, seemed to be at odds with the defeatism of his statement. “But I suppose I can give it a go anyway.”  


“Do what you want to do, Lucas,” said Dustin. It might have just been the oppressive tiredness of a broken night’s sleep and several hours’ walk, but the atmosphere seemed almost surreal with unexpected maturity, with the knowledge that he had played on swingsets and slides with the boy walking alongside him, and was now talking to him about adulthood not as a distant horizon but as an imminent thing. “And we’ll be with you every step of the way, if we can help.”  


Lucas nodded, and Dustin wondered if he too was feeling the same strange incongruousness. “And then the government will end up trying to shut me down in the end, you know, like they do with all of the others. And I’m not going to go quietly.”  


“Wow,” said Dustin. “Being hunted by the government. Wonder what that’ll be like.”  


There was a silence, and then, almost unnoticeably, Lucas snorted slightly, and then followed it with a faint chuckle. And Dustin could not help it; he laughed under his breath as well, remembering the need for stealth but being unable to completely contain himself, and then Lucas was laughing openly as well, and the cold, frosted air and the mountain winds seemed a little warmer.  


They were at the top of the ridgeline now, the pine trees sparser and shorter than the ones down in the valley beside the road. The road itself was vaguely visible in the half-light of early morning, a couple of military trucks still parked on the hard shoulder of the highway. In the distance, perhaps fifteen miles away, was a small town, and beyond that was something that could well have been a military camp.  


“Lucas,” said Dustin, pointing to the camp, but he was silenced with a hand over his mouth.  


“Listen,” said Lucas. “The soldiers.”  


“I can’t hear anything,” said Dustin, and then realised that this was somewhat ominous; the wind would have carried the sound up to the ridge.  


Lucas nodded. “The sound stopped in the last minute or so. I remember hearing them just now.”  


“Are they closing in? Or leaving us alone?” said Dustin, trying not to sound frantic.  


Lucas shook his head. “They just…stopped.”  


The pair of them stood in silence for a few minutes, and then, just as they were about to begin walking again, there was the unmistakable sound of gunfire, followed by a scream cut short, from down in the valley. This was followed by another silence, more ominous than the last.  


Lucas turned to Dustin. “There’s something out there. Maybe the same thing that took out the bus.”  


“What do we do?” said Dustin, trying not to panic.  


Lucas shook his head, his eyes wide. “It’s killed all the soldiers. Must have done. And we’re next.”  


*******  


_“Mrs Byers? Mrs Byers, can you hear me?”  
_

__

_“I can hear you, Steve. Sorry for hanging up on you earlier. Safety, you know.”_  


__

_“It’s cool. Are the kids there? Will and El?”_  


__

_“No, they’ve gone out into town. I haven’t told them yet, just in case…”_  


__

_“We called the depot in Louisville, and Mr and Mrs Sinclair have driven up there to ask about what’s going on. I heard that there was some delay to the middle bus, or something?”_  


__

_“The Sinclairs? Why are they involved?”  
_

__

__

__

_“Well, we had to go over there to get a radio – Erica’s got her own one, hidden under her bed–”  
_

____

__

____

_“And you didn’t even ask my permission to use it, just came and grabbed it off me like some kind of stormtrooper –”  
_

_____ _

__

_____ _

_“Oh, I’m sorry that we’re violating your property rights whilst trying to_ look for your missing brother _–”  
_

______ _ _

__

______ _ _

_“Shut up, both of you. Mrs Byers, do you know anything that might be important here? Anything strange happening over the last week?”  
_

_______ _ _ _

__

_______ _ _ _

_“Sorry, who’s this speaking now?”  
_

________ _ _ _ _

__

________ _ _ _ _

_“It’s Robin. Steve’s friend. Erm, the other one who was captured in the summer? By the Russians?”  
_

_________ _ _ _ _ _

__

_________ _ _ _ _ _

_“Oh, yes, I remember; sorry, Robin. Please do call me Joyce.”  
_

__________ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

__________ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Erm, alright.”  
_

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

___________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“And no, nothing weird happened when they were over here. But I’ve been through the local newspapers, and there’s been a couple of disappearances here in the last few months – they don’t look too unusual, but I’m keeping my eye out. Will and El aren’t allowed to go out after dark at the moment, even if it does turn out to be nothing.”  
_

____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Hey, Mrs Byers, does El have her powers back yet? Her magic mind stuff?”  
_

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_____________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Steve, for God’s sake, it’s clearly not magic, it’s psychic –”  
_

______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Oh, gosh, sorry, Robin, I forgot that someone made you professor of psychic studies –”  
_

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_______________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“No, she doesn’t, Steve. I think she’s on the verge of giving up on them, truth be told.”  
_

________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“So she can’t find where the others have gone. Shit. Erm, sorry, Mrs Byers, I mean, darn.”  
_

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“No, it’s OK, Steve, it’s understandable. Oh, hold on, my phone’s ringing, I’ve got to take this.”  
_

__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

[Silence.]  


__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

__________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“I still don’t see why you couldn’t just phone her yourself. Are you both too cheap to pay for the phone bill?”  
_

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

___________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Erica. Stop complaining. We’re doing it like this in case someone’s tapping the wires.”  
_

____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“What, you think the Russians are still here in Hawkins?”  
_

_____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_____________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“I was more thinking our government, actually. They’ve done it before, Dustin says.”  
_

______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Yeah, as much as you might think that they can do no wrong because they’re capitalist –”  
_

_______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_______________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Actually, it’s the underlying economic theory of capitalism that I agree with, not every single government that attempts to put it into practice. But you work in a video shop and probably voted for Mondale, so I wouldn’t expect you to –”  
_

________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“I wasn’t even old enough in ’84 – and you’re talking a pretty big game for a literal child wearing frilly dungarees –”  
_

_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Steve? Robin? Are you still there?”  
_

__________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

__________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Yeah, we’re here, Mrs Byers – shit, sorry, Joyce. Who was that?”  
_

___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

___________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“The bus company. They’d promised to phone me back. Turns out that there was an accident last night on that route, near a town called Ansted, in West Virginia. They’re putting it down to a deer running out in front of the bus and the driver swerving. But no injuries, apparently, and they got a new bus an hour later. The military requisitioned one from Charleston.”  
_

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“The military? Like – like the army?”  
_

_____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_____________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“No, Steve, she means the coastguard –”  
_

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Robin, I swear to God –”  
_

_______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_______________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Yes, Steve, the army. I’ve looked it up, and there’s some kind of military site not far from Ansted. That’s where they’ll have been taken.”  
_

________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“What do we do?”  
_

_________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

_________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“I don’t know yet. There’s someone else I need to call first – and I should go to get Will and El as well – and then I’ll get back to you. Don’t go anywhere.”  
_

__________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

__________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Don’t worry, Mrs Byers. You can count on us.”  
_

___________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

___________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Well, thanks, Erica. What does Will always say – over and out.”  
_

____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

__

____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

_“Over and out.”_  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

After a few seconds of dead air, a hand reached over and turned off the tape recorder.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

*******  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

It was cold and windy in Washington D.C. that Sunday, as it had been for the last few weeks, and there was a thin patina of ice on the sidewalk outside the church. Jasna did not slip on it, for she was ready; last Sunday, a young Irish boy had broken his arm on the ice whilst running out of Mass, and she was in no mood to repeat his experience. Quite aside from the whole question of pain, it was by no means a given that she would be able to get the injury seen to or treated. So she walked calmly and surely, wrapping her long red scarf several times around her exposed face and bracing herself for a long walk ahead. The café, which had insisted this morning (to the chagrin of Jasna’s parents) that they needed the staff, was four blocks away, which in the January weather might as well have been the entire Yukon Territory, but that was life.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jen Stanton and her group were huddled on the sidewalk in front of her, wearing significantly more expensive coats than Jasna’s, and chatting idly amongst themselves. Probably something about the priests, Jasna suspected; Jen had long been running some kind of betting ring (completely devoid of irony) about which would be the first to leave and why, and the odds were updated every other week. Surreptitiously, she attempted to manoeuvre round them, but the sidewalk was narrow, too narrow, and she was spotted.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Hey, Yazzy,” said Jen, with a faux-happiness, “Didn’t see you there. Is that a new coat?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Hi, Jen,” said Jasna, mentally gritting her teeth. “It’s not, no. Had it a while.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Yeah,” said Jen, as if deep in thought. “Now I come to think of it, didn’t you have it this time last year? And the year before that?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna nodded slightly. “It’s a good coat. Keeps me warm.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“And such an…interesting style, too,” Jen said. “Is that what everyone wears in Yugoslavia these days? It’s so wonderfully minimalistic.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“I don’t know,” said Jasna. “I’ve never lived there. I was born here in Washington.” And then, because she could not stop herself, she added, “I think I mentioned that the other day, actually.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“See, that’s the thing,” said Jen. “I guess I just don’t take that much of an interest in your life, really.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

And with that, amidst the muffled laughter of the rest of the crowd, Jen swept away. One of them – Harriet Hastings, Jasna thought, although she wasn’t sure – cast a slightly apologetic smile back over her shoulder as she left.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Yeah,” muttered Jasna to herself. “Thanks for the backup there, Harriet.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

But she did not dwell on it for too long, because on the other side of the street, a car was parked, and two people were sitting in the front, watching her. The car was old and battered, as thought it had driven through several hedges and at least one hurricane, and its registration plates were from Indiana. But it was the people she was more interested in, and – as they noticed that she had spotted them – the door swung open, and an attractive young woman with long brown hair stepped out of the passenger seat, wearing a long jacket and a pair of heavy boots, followed by the young man who had been driving.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna assessed her options. She would not be able to run very effectively on the ice, but she could probably make it to the church before them, and – what – plead for sanctuary? Or, failing this, if they were going to mug her, then she could hand over the ten dollars in the pocket of her coat, and pretend that she had left her purse at home, instead of concealing it under layers and layers of clothing.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Her thoughts were interrupted when the young woman said, “Excuse me? Are you Jasna Konstanjević?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna’s expression presumably gave away both the identity and the fear she was feeling, and the woman hastened to add, “Sorry! I’m Anna Burbank; we’ve been writing to each other?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Anna Burbank?” said the young man, a sceptical tone in his voice.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“OK, fine,” she huffed. “That’s not exactly my real name, but I thought there was no reason not to be careful. Can we talk?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The fight-or-flight reflex had left Jasna now – Anna had been corresponding with her for a couple of months now, generally about politics and life in Washington – but she was still conscious of the time, and the cold. “Can it wait? Sorry, I’d really love to talk, but I’ve got to make it to work before 12:30.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Fancy a lift?” said the young man. His gaze was disconcertingly intense, but there was a kindness underneath his words, with the same sort of apologetic politeness which Jasna’s parents had unsuccessfully tried to train her out of.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna blinked. “Would that be alright?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“No trouble at all,” said the woman who was apparently not called Anna. “You work at a café, right? I think you mentioned that a couple of weeks back?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Yeah, over on Swann Street Northwest,” said Jasna, still feeling a faint disorientation as they crossed the road again, and climbed into the old car. “I’ll direct you there. Sorry, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but who actually are you both?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The young woman turned around in her seat, offering her hand to Jasna to shake. “My real name’s Nancy Wheeler. This is my boyfriend, Jonathan. Again, I’m sorry for the secrecy, but I had to be careful. This is a particularly sensitive matter, and there’s always people listening.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy and Jonathan took a corner table in the café when they arrived, and began to talk to each other in hushed voices over a few sheets of paper, while Jasna started to work. It was a slow day, with customers only arriving every fifteen minutes or so, but the weather was cold enough outside that they tended to stay and order multiple hot drinks before braving the sleet again. As Jasna delivered their orders and wiped the tables clean once they had departed – it truly was incredible how much coffee a grown man could spill on the table without realising it – she tried to listen to the whispered conversation between Nancy and Jonathan, in the hope that it would reveal a bit more about why they were here and what they wanted from Jasna, but they were good. They seemed to have some kind of code, some private language, between one another, speaking about things that made no sense (what on earth was a Starcourt Situation? What was the Flayer?) or about people – Owens, Benny, Barb – whose names Jasna had never heard before. So she kept working, serving the drinks and clearing the tables, smiling for the customers and trying not to think about how she would have to go home at the end of all this and face another tirade about working on a Sunday, until, eventually, there was nobody else left in the café.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy beckoned her over. “Is there anyone else here?” she asked.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“No,” said Jasna, who was rapidly coming to accept the paranoia that seemed to be surrounding her. “Well, two people in the back, but they won’t disturb us. This is when they pretend to be doing the dishes, and actually spend half an hour smoking weed and listening to Pink Floyd.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jonathan tilted his head. “Not the worst choice of music, at least.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy pursed her lips. “I swear to God, Jonathan, if I hear one more word from you about music, I’m not going to let you take part in my investigation any more.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Your investigation,” said Jonathan, his tone flat but his eyes somewhat playful. “I see.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Oh, don’t pretend you’re not just along for the ride,” she replied. “Anyway, Jasna, sorry about him. He hasn’t shut up since I made him stop playing his depressing tapes around Fredericksburg.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna seized on the only thing she could, like a drowning sailor clutching at a fragment of driftwood. “Fredericksburg? Have you come far today?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy looked somewhat reticent, but then said, “Quite far. From down near Newport News, this morning.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Why?” said Jasna, then realised what she had just said. “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. What are you doing in Washington? Why come and see me?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“You two were corresponding, right?” said Jonathan. “By letters?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna nodded. “A mutual friend put us in touch, apparently. Told Anna – Nancy – that she should talk to me about some project she was doing about the American political system.” Jasna eyed Nancy across the table. “But that’s not true, is it?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy nodded, and it seemed to Jasna as though there was a glimmer of approval at her disbelief beneath the businesslike manner. “Not really, no. It was Murray – Murray Bauman. You’ve met him before, haven’t you?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna blinked in confusion, a couple of times, before sitting down at the table, and leaning in. “Only once. Three, maybe four years ago. A friend of mine…well, he died, and Mr Bauman was called in by his parents. It was a traffic accident, you see; he was hit by a car. Not Mr Bauman. My friend. George Douglas.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself, for the accident did not seem so long ago all of a sudden, now that she was talking about it again. “It turned out that it was a government guy who hit George, ran him over and drove off. The police didn’t really do much about it – George was black – and so his parents got Mr Bauman in to do some digging, find out who had killed him. He found out that it was this government guy, but he never got brought to trial or anything. Everyone had to sign non-disclosure forms, and, wow, abracadabra, nobody was ever allowed to talk about it again. His parents moved away, and that was that.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy placed a steadying hand on Jasna’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna looked up, and met Nancy’s deep blue eyes for the first time. It was odd, really, Jasna thought; if she’d seen Nancy on the street, she would have assumed that she was just someone like Jen Stanton, a popular girl with a life conveniently mapped out from school to college to quiet desperation in suburbia. But the eyes didn’t fit with that, didn’t fit at all. No, there was something deep inside there struggling to get out, an unquenched, burning anger, directed not at Jasna but at the world. They were the sort of eyes that Jasna would not have liked to stare into for too long – not because of any aesthetic elements (she had no complaints there), but because it would be like looking directly at the sun.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“That’s not all, is it?” said Jonathan, his tone still kindly, but underlaid with something else as well. Curiosity, perhaps. “Murray wouldn’t just send us to a random person.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jasna looked down at the table now, and hastily glanced around the café before muttering, “I may have stolen some official paperwork and given it to Mr Bauman.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Nancy sat up straight with a startled little laugh, and Jonathan raised his eyebrows appreciatively.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Don’t look at me like that,” Jasna continued. “It wasn’t anything major. Just some legal things, records, official statements. My father’s firm was working the case.” There was no reply from the other side of the table, so she ploughed on, feeling a reckless sort of courage overtake her. “I just had to do something. George was dead, and nobody was saying anything, and I had to let someone know. I couldn’t let them cover it all up. I couldn’t do that to him.” Then she stopped, and sat in a stunned silence, hoping faintly that Nancy and Jonathan were not actually undercover police officers running a long game on her.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Believe me,” said Nancy, “we understand. We really do.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Jonathan nodded wordlessly.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“I had a friend too,” said Nancy. “And she died as well, and they covered it up. And then they covered even more things up, and hid a lot of things from everyone, and let a lot of good people die. And the truth’s here, somewhere, and we’re going to find it.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

She stood up, her back to the window, where the snow danced in the evening wind under the streetlights, and offered her hand to Jasna.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“Do you want to help?”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

*******  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Mike opened his eyes, and found that he could not move. His arms were tied behind his back with what seemed like a thin rope, and his legs were tied to a chair. Glancing to his left, he saw Max in a similar state, also beginning to stir from her chloroform-induced sleep.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

The room around them was bare, the lights bright. There was a black carpet on the floor, and a large window on the other side, next to a door. A camera silently winked to itself in the corner, high on the plain plastered wall.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

A few feet in front of them, on another chair, sat a middle-aged man, with handsome features and a gleaming, pristine uniform. He leaned forwards.  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

“I am so sorry about all that,” he said, in a Hollywood voice. “But, believe me, it was for the best. My name’s Jack Beeching, and I’ve got a few questions I need to ask you both. The fate of our country might depend upon it.”  


____________________________________ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for making it this far - please don't hesitate to comment if you have any thoughts, opinions, observations, or anything else to say!


	5. Private Investigations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick clarification - not all of these scenes are happening absolutely simultaneously, with some slightly later in the day than others. Hopefully it should all seem vaguely clear...

Jim Hopper had almost recovered by the time the next set of visitors arrived.  


He had tried to put his conversation with Sarah, or with whatever was using her face and voice, out of his mind, with only sporadic success. In the days – that is, in his waking hours, for there was no hint of change in the oppressive, ashy gloom which blanketed his twisted parody of Hawkins – he was able to forget, to ignore everything and focus on the important business of gathering food and fortifying his house. But, eventually, he would have to sleep, to curl up in his lair and rest his jittering, paranoid, mind for another day, and then there was no escape.  


When he closed his eyes, and occasionally a moment or two before that, he could see her standing in the centre of his cabin, begging him to accept that he was dead, offering her tiny hand to him. He was beginning to wonder if she was right.  


So the subjective days passed, and each one of them was another nail in his coffin, another confirmation that nobody was coming to save him. At one point he attempted to calculate what day it might be in the real world, relying on memory and guesswork and the number of empty cans of food that surrounded his fortress, and discovered that it was somewhere in the region of Christmas. But the carols he quietly sang, in a voice made hoarse through dehydration and lack of use, did not help to improve his spirits, and somewhere in the middle of ‘Silent Night’, he gave up.  


In the silence and stillness, there was a knock on the door.  


His maudlin mood forgotten, Hopper sprang to his feet like a leopard, grasping the axe which lay by his side and the long, rusted carving knife which he had found a few days previously in the shadowy wreck of Melvald’s. He had not forgotten how to move silently – indeed, he had been able to practice a great deal in the last few months – and so he stalked over to the door, and, cautiously, peered through a tiny gap between planks of wood.  


Joyce Byers was standing outside, the mist and ash swirling all around her. Somehow, she was wearing the same Soviet uniform as the day when they had closed the Gate, when he had left the real world behind him.  


Politely, she raised her hand to knock again, and Hopper felt some deep longing impulse take hold of him. He jerked the door open before she could knock, and stared down at her.  


“Joyce,” he said, quietly.  


“Hop,” she replied, her voice and expression unreadable.  


He kept staring. He had forgotten the exact details of her face, the way her hair fell over her forehead and ears, the shape of her chin and the corners of her mouth. Some time in the last six months, all of the specifics had been eroded away in his memory by time and pain, leaving only a handful of fragments, the barest sketch of Joyce. When he thought of her, when he imagined her, he imagined the name more than the picture these days.  


But here she was, all the little details back again. So he stared at her, and tried to commit as much to memory as he could.  


“What are you doing here?” he finally asked.  


She rolled her eyes, a familiar expression. “I thought I’d just pop in on the way to the store, Hop. I’m obviously here for you.”  


He blinked a couple of times, and forced down the hope that was welling inside him. “Is it actually you? You actually came for me?”  


“Hop,” she said, “I came to rescue Will, with you, when he was trapped here. Do you think I wouldn’t come for you as well?”  


“But how?”  


She let out a surprised half-laugh. “You didn’t know that there was a Gate still open? So close to you?”  


“What? Where?”  


She just chuckled again, shaking her head in fond disbelief.  


He took a step back. “It’s not you, is it? This is just another hallucination or whatever.”  


“Hop,” she said, an edge in her voice now, “I promise you I’m real. Don’t you trust me?”  


Hopper gritted his teeth, and clutched the axe tighter, and said, “Where was I going to take you after we closed the Gate?”  


She looked up at him, incredulous. “Seriously? You’re testing me?”  


“Where was I going to take you?” he repeated.  


“Hop, I really don’t –“  


“WHERE?” he shouted, and there was a part of him which was shouting a warning to the rest of his brain, frantically telling him that it was never a good idea to wave a weapon at Joyce Byers, and furthermore that he was letting the anger control him again, but it was overruled.  


And Joyce stepped back, her expression flat and deadly, and coldly, vindictively, triumphant. “Enzo’s,” she said. “We were going to go to Enzo’s. Early, so you could get back for El. But I don’t think that’s going to happen any more, do you?”  


He said nothing, letting the axe hang by his side.  


“Because, you see, here’s the thing,” Joyce continued. “You clearly don’t trust me at all. You don’t trust that I’d come and rescue you. Don’t trust me to go and see Scott Clarke without you getting jealous. Don’t trust that I can notice when things are going wrong around town, that my goddamned magnets are something that you should be taking seriously.”  


She leaned back against the wall, leisurely, almost catlike, whilst Hopper fought to try and find something he could say in response.  


“Maybe it’s a good thing you didn’t find the way out of here,” she said. “I think we’re better off without you. Without a jealous, possessive, angry man breathing down our necks all the time, snapping at the slightest infraction or challenge. Without a lazy drunk in the chief of police’s office. Maybe it’s not all bad for Hawkins now.”  


“Maybe I’m better off,” said another voice from behind Joyce, another voice which hurt like a sledgehammer to the lungs. And out stepped El, clutching Joyce’s hand, and staring Hopper dead in the eyes, with none of the curiosity or humour or petulance or kindness that was normally in her gaze, but with a flat disgust.  


“Oh, now I know that this isn’t real,” said Hopper weakly, for he would have seen her, he would certainly have seen her.  


El shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. Still true.”  


“And I suppose you’re going to tell me the same, then,” he said. “You’re going to tell me that you’re better off without me.”  


She nodded. “Joyce is kinder. She doesn’t ground me or yell at me. She doesn’t threaten my boyfriend, or storm drunkenly into my room. But you never trusted me. You never wanted me to be myself. Just kept me as a replacement for Sarah. Like a photograph.”  


Hopper felt his knees threaten to give way, as a swooping, churning, darkness filled his stomach. Joyce and El turned, still hand-in-hand, and began to walk away into the swirling mists.  


“Where are you going?” he asked, desperation in his tone. “Don’t…don’t go…”  


Joyce turned to look over her shoulder, but kept walking. “Does it matter where? Like we said, we’re better off without you.”  


Hopper shook his head stubbornly. “It’s not you. I know it isn’t. The real El wouldn’t say that. The real Joyce wouldn’t mind me asking for proof.”  


“Oh, Hop,” said the thing wearing the face of the two most important women in the world to him. “You never knew the real versions of us.”  


And they were gone.  


*******  


Josh Bateyi was having a lovely day in town, all things considered, when the Byers twins ran – literally ran, sprinted at full speed – into him.  


“Hi, guys,” he said from the floor, where he had been inadvertently knocked. “How’s it going?”  


El seemed not to have entirely noticed that he was there, that he had fallen, and continued on her way, but Will had stopped, and lowered a hand to help Josh up.  


“Oh, god, I’m so sorry,” said Will quickly. “I was running and I didn’t see you – are you alright?”  


Josh smiled. “Me? Yeah, fine, my bones are basically made of vulcanised rubber. Where are you off to?”  


El had stopped as well, and was casting a pleading look in Will’s direction. A small corner of Josh’s brain began to muse on telepathy, the old urban legends that twins could talk to each other with their minds. He didn’t believe them, obviously – he was a Man of Science, like his books advised him to be, not some kind of Sufi mystic – but, looking at Will and El, he began to understand why the stories might have got themselves started in the first place.  


Will just shook his head, his long hair flicking in all directions in the wind. “Long story. Are you busy?”  


“Nope!” said Josh. “I’m all finished for the day, run all of the errands that Dad gave me. I’ve been to –“  


Will cut him off, which in Josh’s limited experience was not like him. “Follow us, then,” he said, his voice urgent. “And keep up. We’re being followed.”  


Josh turned to look behind them, at the empty high street of Winterton, and turned back to ask a clarifying question, but Will was already running down a side alley, and El was already gone, so he raised his eyebrows to an imaginary audience, and followed them.  


As it turned out, they did not have far to run; at the end of the alley was the park, and on the other side of that, unconvincingly fenced off, was a jumbled collection of old shipping containers and junk. Josh had played there when he was younger and had just moved to Winterton, and had had a great time playing at being The Man Who Saved The World by himself in the maze of scraps, but eventually his father had found out, and had been forced to put a stop to that, having heard stories in town about people who had been buried alive under mountains of garbage or killed by tetanus from the rusted fragments of corrugated iron. But the Byers twins seemed to have no such reservations, and – after a meaningful glance between themselves – swerved into the scrapheap, ducking behind the wreck of an old pickup truck. Josh followed, because he had no idea what was going on, and this seemed like it would be the best way of finding out.  


They sat down, their backs against an old fridge, and tried to recover their collective breath.  


“I miss bikes,” said El, through gasps. “This was easier with bikes.”  


Will nodded absently, then said, “Wait, can you actually ride a bike?”  


El considered, then shook her head. “I’d need Mike as well.” Then she bit her lip, and added, “Sorry. Forgot.”  


Josh, who had been watching this whole exchange in mounting confusion – how could Will not know if his sister could ride a bike? – seized on the first thing he could think of. “Who’s Mike?”  


Will turned to him, and smiled slightly, apologetically. His long hair was plastered against his forehead with sweat, despite the cold air; he was wrapped in a coat and a scarf, with a hat sticking out of his pocket, and it seemed that he had not been planning on sprinting in this amount of clothing. “El’s boyfriend. From back in Indiana. Sorry.”  


“Will doesn’t like him any more,” added El, in a helpful tone.  


Will frowned. “That’s not – it’s not – we’ve got a nuanced relationship.”  


“Will doesn’t like him,” repeated El.  


Josh paused, and then said, “OK. Now we’ve got the main matter of who Mike is out of the way, then, I guess I’ve just got one more minor query. What, in the name of the Prophet, peace be upon him, is going on?”  


El shushed him. Josh blinked, and opened his mouth to rephrase his question, but Will shook his head slightly, and leaned over him to peer around the edge of the truck. Then he stiffened, and sat up sharply.  


“Someone here,” he whispered. Josh almost had to strain in order to hear. “Different man. Shorter. Looking.”  


El seemed to shrink in on herself a little, and her breathing took on a note of fear. Will hesitantly put an arm around her shoulders, but there was fear in his eyes as well, and realisation dawned upon Josh with the immediacy of a foghorn.  


This was not a game. This was not exaggeration. This was real, as real as it had been for him when he was nine years old. This was life or death.  


The mere thought of his own experiences was like a shock to the system, like ice being poured into his arteries, and he, too, began to breathe more quickly at the prospect of having to face something like that again. Will and El turned to him, with sympathy and dread in their faces, and Will again poked his head a fraction of a centimetre around the edge of the truck, and – slowly, far too slowly to be anything other than a motion calculated in stark terror – sat up. Josh could somehow see, in Will’s eyes, that the man was much closer now.  


His breathing was out of control now, and was becoming louder and louder. El cast a silent, imploring glance at him, and he returned it with a look of panic. Will raised his other arm, slowly, slowly, and put his hand on Josh’s shoulder, and looked him dead in the eyes, and, somehow, Josh felt ever so slightly calmer. Then, Will slowly lifted his hand from Josh’s shoulder, and pressed it over his mouth, muffling his breathing.  


They remained in this strange rictus for a minute, maybe two minutes, listening to the wind and the faintest sound of footsteps, which eventually receded into the distance. The three of them cast confused glances at each other, and El peered beneath the truck, and then slowly nodded.  


In an almost synchronised motion, which Josh would have found rather funny if he wasn’t panicking, all three of them slumped in relief like puppets with cut strings. After a second of relief, Will apparently realised that his hand was still covering Josh’s mouth, gently resting across his lower face, and removed it as though it had been scalded.  


They looked at each other, and then all began to talk at once.  


“Who was –“  


“Did you –“  


“What the fu-“  


A brief, awkward silence fell, as each of them stopped to let the others speak. El broke it first.  


“Will,” she said, her voice quiet, “Was it – you know –“ She gestured, confusingly, at the back of her neck. Will shivered slightly, but shook his head.  


“I don’t think so,” he said. “Maybe. It doesn’t feel that different from actual fear. Did you recognise him, from – you know –“  


El, too, shook her head. “Didn’t see him well. But not Papa.”  


“Can I repeat my earlier question?” said Josh. “What’s going on? Why are we being chased? Why are we hiding? What – what – what’s going on?”  


Will and El turned to him, simultaneous in a way which Josh presumed that only actual twins could be.  


“We, erm, don’t really know yet,” said Will, his voice kindly as ever. “We’re trying to work that out. But it’s not good.”  


“Yeah,” said Josh. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”  


“Something’s happening,” said El. “Here. I thought we’d got away.”  


Will nodded, biting his lip in worry. “I guess it followed us. Or we’re just unlucky.”  


“No such thing as luck,” said El, forcefully. “Hop always says – said – that.” She stared at Will, almost defensive, as if she was daring him to expect her to turn away.  


“Who followed you?” said Josh. “I’m so lost. I am so absolutely lost right now.”  


“There’s a couple of possibilities,” said Will. “Look, you live here in town, right? Has anything…weird been happening recently? Any strange things?”  


Josh shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know, people don’t really talk to me. I think someone went missing two weeks ago?”  


He was not expecting the reaction he got, which was pure dread from both Will and El.  


“Are you…sure?” asked Will, quietly.  


Josh shrugged again. “Like, eighty percent? Is it important? Linked to this whole – this whole thing here?” He gestured around at the situation.  


El seemed to come to a decision, and stood up with resolve. “We need to find out more,” she declared.  


“How?” asked Will.  


“Well,” said Josh, “there’s the library. I don’t mean to brag, but it’s virtually my second home.”  


Will cast him a sideways glance undercut with amusement. “That’s bragging, is it?”  


Josh grinned, feeling oddly pleased with himself. “Oh, absolutely. Me and the librarians are like this.” He crossed his fingers. El, for some reason, studied his hands, and then tried to imitate the gesture herself, seeming more curious than anything.  


“That’ll help?” said Will.  


Josh nodded. “If we’re going to find out what’s going on in Winterton – if something’s happening – that’s where the information will be.” He paused, wondering if he should risk asking, and then decided that the time for cautiousness had ended when he had sprinted after Will. “This thing – is this the thing that you mentioned had happened? When we met, back in November?”  


Will looked away, and then said, “I hope not. But probably. We’d better find out.”  


He rose to his feet, offering Josh a hand up. Josh took it.  


*******  


“We’re not saying anything,” said Max, immediately. She had seen enough crime shows, after all. “We’ve got a right to remain silent.”  


The adult – Beeching – looked at her with a disarming smile, which she refused to allow herself to be disarmed by. “Isn’t that only for criminal suspects?”  


“So you’re saying that we’re not suspected of anything?” said Mike, from the chair he was tied to, and as much as the guy annoyed Max, she was half-impressed with the stony suspicion in his voice. He could have taken lessons from her younger self.  


Beeching turned his smile to Mike. “Mr Wheeler, you are absolutely not suspected of anything – unless, of course, there’s anything you’d like to tell us. That’s not why you’re here at all.”  


“So?”  


“We’ve brought you here,” said Beeching, “to ask you a few questions. That’s all.”  


“And that had to involve chloroforming us?” said Max. “That had to involve grabbing us, forcing us into a truck, and drugging us so we wouldn’t shout for help? Yeah, that sounds all totally above board and fine.”  


Beeching dropped his smile now, in favour of a sincere stare. “We really are truly sorry about having to resort to that. Time and secrecy are very much of the essence, you see. We hoped that you’d – well, not forgive us immediately, of course, but we hoped that you’d come to understand eventually.”  


“So you want to interrogate us, then?” said Max. “Like, I’m not accusing you, I just want to get things clear here.”  


“Miss Mayfield,” said Beeching, “interrogation is a very strong word, and I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. We’re not the bad guys here.”  


Max nodded in agreement. “The good guys often chloroform children. They’re known for it.”  


“Happens in all the films,” agreed Mike from his chair.  


Beeching chuckled indulgently. “Alright, alright, I can see that we’ve not got off on the best of footings here, have we? I suppose that’s the importance of a good first impression; don’t get a second chance to make one, after all.”  


“What do you want?” asked Mike, evidently wanting to cut to the chase.  


“Well,” said Beeching, “put simply, there’s a few things we need to know about the last few years. About the creatures you’ve encountered, and the dimension they came from. And about your friend, the lovely Miss Hopper – or is it Miss Byers, now? In any case, we could use your help with that.”  


“Why?” asked Max. “Sorry, I mean, why do you think we’re going to tell you?”  


Beeching leaned back in his chair. His had a cushioned back, Max noticed. Hers did not.  


“Look,” he said, “you’re both smart kids, I know. Heck, I’ve seen your school reports – good job on the Spanish, there, Miss Mayfield, top marks – and I know that you’re able to appreciate the bigger picture with these sorts of things. So, please, do believe me when I say that the picture in this case is the size of the whole planet, and we’ve got to do one very difficult task. We’ve got to make sure that these forces, these creatures, don’t end up being taken and weaponised by the Russians, by the Chinese, by the terrorists. We’ve got to make sure – and when I say we, I’m including you here, because you’re a part of this whether you like it or not – that it’s the USA with the keys to the other world, so that we can do whatever we have to in order to keep the world safe from it.”  


He smiled slightly. “Now, I know you haven’t had the best of experiences before with the government. But the government’s a pretty big tent, and it’s not all composed of people like Martin Brenner. He was a loose cannon – a maniac, quite frankly, who accidentally found himself on the strategic front line. But now we know the importance of this, and we’re keeping a very close eye on it indeed.”  


“So we’re just going to give you all the information you want?” asked Max.  


“It’s just a few things, Miss Mayfield,” said Beeching, “and then we’ll let you go on your way, back to Hawkins. We really do hope that the two of you will cooperate with us. I’m being sincere when I say that it’s what’s best for all of us.”  


Max opened her mouth to say something else – she wasn’t entirely sure what – but she was pre-empted by a knock at the door, which opened to reveal a shorter man in military dress, who apologetically beckoned Beeching over.  


“Do excuse me for one moment,” said Beeching with a smile. “Can’t get away from the job.”  


“We’re not going anywhere,” said Mike.  


Beeching rose, and began to talk to the other man. Max tried to listen in, an automatic reflex, but her mind was whirring with questions and confusion. And, beneath it all, was a strange relief. _No Lucas. No Dustin. They didn’t get them._  


Her thoughts were broken by a quiet exclamation from Beeching. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure, Captain?”  


The other man nodded. “They tricked us, sir. It’s not him at all. They must have found some kind of body double, covered him with the right DNA and taught him a few things to say – I don’t know, sir. I’m so sorry.”  


Beeching was horribly still for a moment, and then straightened up, and said, “That’s alright, Captain. You’re not the one at fault here. I’m not one of those people to apportion blame where it doesn’t belong.”  


“Yes, sir.”  


“The notes were all good, though, weren’t they?” Beeching asked, and the soldier was beginning to answer, nodding, when Max was distracted by a faint hiss from Mike.  


She turned to him. He was staring at her, with something unreadable behind his eyes.  


“Follow my lead,” he whispered. “Go with what I say.”  


Max, conscious of secrecy, silently furrowed her eyebrows questioningly. Mike only shook his head, and turned away from her, just as Beeching dismissed the soldier and returned to his chair.  


“So sorry about that,” he said, all charm again. “Minor mixup with a particular operation. Paperwork’s going to be hell on this one, I can tell you that.” He smiled ruefully.  


“Something went wrong?” asked Max.  


Beeching only shook his head. “Nothing we can’t fix. So, shall I begin with the questions?”  


Mike, reluctance emanating from every aspect of his posture, nodded. “And then get us home. My dad – he’ll be so worried if I’m not back in time.”  


“Oh, never mind about that, Mr Wheeler,” said Beeching with a chuckle. “I do know how fathers can worry. I’ll get you out of trouble, if I have to.”  


Mike nodded.  


“So,” said Beeching. “Let’s get going. Miss Hopper – Jane – whatever you want to call her – when did you first meet her?”  


“1983,” said Mike. “We met her in 1983, when it all started.”  


Max began to object, to say that she hadn’t been in Hawkins at the time, but something in Mike’s expression stopped her. Instead, she nodded.  


“That checks out,” muttered Beeching to himself. “And when you met her, you found out that she had opened a gateway into the other dimension?”  


“Sort of,” said Mike. “It wasn’t really her. Brenner used her like some kind of homing beacon, I think, and then built some kind of machine.”  


Beeching looked up from his notes at this. “Really? A machine?”  


Mike nodded. “I never saw it. Jane did. They strapped her into it, and told her to imagine a pathway through the air, and then it – it sort of, sort of, followed that pathway. Cut into the other dimension.”  


“Interesting,” said Beeching, who was scribbling to himself. “Do you know, Mr Wheeler, Brenner never shared the exact details with anyone. His colleagues generally fell victim to that creature that came through. We’d been wondering about the specifics for some time now.”  


“He destroyed the machine,” said Mike. “After it broke through. Or it was destroyed, somehow. Hopper said so, when he came back from the Lab.”  


“So Jane didn’t actively open the gateway, then?” asked Beeching.  


Mike shook his head. “No. Jane was just – what did Dustin say – a catalyst for it. Right, Max?”  


And it dawned on Max, exactly what Mike was trying to do, just as he said the name ‘Jane’ again. “Right. She was basically a giant battery or something. Could have been anyone.”  


“Anyone with powers, surely,” said Beeching. “Otherwise he wouldn’t have used her for that.”  


Mike and Max both, slowly, nodded.  


“Let’s move on,” said Beeching. “The second time, in 1984. Another creature – we’ve given it an official codename here, Orpheus, since all of the records are a bit contradictory – tried to break out through the gateway. How did it do that?”  


“Well,” said Max, trying to look as though she was trying to piece the story together, when in fact she was frantically inventing something, “it opened another gateway, somewhere else. Then it started to possess people, and started trying to construct some big…thing.”  


She trailed off, but Mike was ready. “Like a big stone circle or something. In our world, that is. At the site where they built Starcourt the year after.”  


“Yeah,” said Max, picking up the thread. “It needed power, I think, so it started diverting power to this place. Then it tried to kill Jane, by possessing that old guy – Bob, his name was.”  


“The one who died in the Lab?” asked Beeching. “Bob Newby?”  


Mike nodded. “The creature – he fought off its influence, sort of, and it had him killed.”  


“And you managed to close the gateway,” said Beeching. It was not a question.  


“Yeah,” said Max. “We destroyed the stone circle, blew it up with fertiliser. That made the gateway unstable, apparently.”  


Beeching nodded, and made another few notes. “And the battle at the Lab? The place was nearly destroyed; old Sammy Owens nearly died, I heard, and what a loss that would have been for all of us.”  


“Oh, that was kind of a sideshow,” said Mike. “It tried to track down Chief Hopper as well, since he was one of the first people to see it, and it sent a whole bunch of creatures into the Lab.”  


“Fair enough,” said Beeching agreeably. “And then last summer as well. You kids have had a fun few years, haven’t you?”  


Max rolled her eyes, and could sense that Mike was probably doing something similar. “It tried to get back in. The Russians opened the Gate again, wanting to do some kind of genetic experiments on the creatures, and kidnapped a bunch of people to use as slave labour, but we found them out in time.”  


“Your brother was there, wasn’t he?” said Beeching, almost softly.  


Max nodded. “He – he was captured by them. He tried to escape, and they – they shot him –“  


The story was not real, but the welling tears were. Beeching turned to Mike.  


“And what about Jane?” he asked. “What about our resident psychic? What was she doing in all this?”  


“Oh, not much,” said Mike, in an odd tone of voice. “She helped when we were tracking down the Russians, and helped us out in a tight spot or two, but she was mostly on the sidelines for this one. And then her powers burnt out when the Russians tried to drug her.”  


“Have they come back?”  


“Don’t think so,” said Mike, still in the same dull voice. “But I don’t really know. We, erm, we, well, we broke up.”  


Beeching smiled ruefully again. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr Wheeler. Weren’t you just down in Virginia with them?”  


Max felt a flash of alarm that this had been one lie too far, but Mike had evidently thought ahead, because he just let out a deep sigh. “I was trying to win her back. But she wasn’t interested. She wasn’t interested in any of us any more. Her and Will are all popular now, and they don’t have time for their old friends.”  


Max nodded in support, whilst wondering to herself what the point of lying about this detail was. “It really sucks. Jane said that she didn’t want to be burdened by us any more.”  


“That’s a real shame,” agreed Beeching. “But, if you want a free piece of advice from an old fellow like me, then the friends like that are often the friends that you can do without.”  


Mike nodded hesitantly. “Erm, thanks, sir.”  


“Oh, please, just call me Mr Beeching,” said Beeching genially. “You two have been a really great help to us today. Let me just go and talk to some of my colleagues, and then we’ll see what we can do about getting you home again.”  


*******  


“Any reply yet?” asked Nancy, calling through to the kitchen where Jonathan stood. He shook his head, but continued listening to the telephone. Nancy turned back to the coffee-table, which was covered in files and newspaper clippings.  


“Sorry again about the mess,” she said to Jasna, who was perched on the arm of the other chair, occasionally casting glances around the room as though she could not entirely remember why she had invited the two of them in. “What time is it that your parents will be getting back?”  


“Late, probably,” said Jasna. Her voice was quiet, almost apologetic, which Nancy was beginning to realise was not a product of the topic of conversation, but of who Jasna was as a person. “It’s Sunday, so they’ll have been seeing friends. No working on the Sabbath.”  


“You’re Catholic, right?” asked Nancy. “The church we met you at looked pretty fancy.”  


Jasna nodded. “We’re Croats originally, so the rules are that we have to be.” Nancy was not sure whether she could detect the merest hint of irony or sarcasm in Jasna’s voice. “My parents were born in America, but they’re very insistent about keeping all the old traditions and stuff.”  


“We’re Methodist in our family,” said Nancy. “But I’m not sure if I’m convinced, myself. The whole religion thing’s been looking a bit more dubious in the last few years for me.”  


Jasna’s face lit up. “I know what you mean! I’ve been reading about this for several months now – what do you make of the Euthyphro dilemma? Or verificationism? Or was it the complete failure of theodicy that made you more doubtful?”  


“Erm,” said Nancy, who had no idea what several of these words meant. “Maybe? I’m not sure. I just mean that it doesn’t seem like there’s much justice sometimes. And a lot of pain and suffering for innocent people.”  


“Ah,” said Jasna, almost shrinking in on herself and turning her eyes to the floor in embarrassment. “I see. Sorry. I get a bit…enthusiastic sometimes about things. I’ll try and rein it in, if you like.”  


Nancy shook her head. “You don’t have to do that – I don’t mind. I just –“  


But she was interrupted by Jonathan emerging from the kitchen, shaking his head in confusion. “No answer at all from home. Mom’s normally back by now, and Will and El should be around. And I tried her work phone, and she wasn’t there either.”  


“Maybe she’s just left,” suggested Nancy, but, deep within the pit of her stomach, she almost knew that this was not the case. “Maybe she’ll be back soon. We can try again in half an hour or so.”  


Jonathan nodded, and sank into the sofa next to Nancy. Jasna slid from the arm of her chair into the seat, and leaned forwards to look at the papers. “Can I ask what you’re – we’re – doing?”  


Nancy leaned forwards as well, and her voice became confident and businesslike. “Here’s the situation. Five blocks from here, there’s a semi-secret government installation, an office building which deals in pretty confidential stuff. They’re linked to some of the people that turned up at Starcourt, just afterwards, and to the team who were doing the cleanup operation for most of July. Less officially – not that any of this is in any way public-domain stuff – they’ve got a lot of personnel who worked at Hawkins Lab before it got shut down. The ones who survived, at least.”  


From the corner of her eye, Nancy noticed Jasna blink in confusion at this detail, and absently wondered how much the other girl could safely be told, before continuing.  


“Most importantly, this is where a lot of the files are kept, in some kind of electronic storage, some computer or something. I asked Mike about it – circuitously, and subtly – and he’s told me broadly how you operate one of those things, so we should be fine there. In that building – they call it Longbow House, apparently – there’s all the information about Hawkins, about the Lab and the coverups, hidden away somewhere. And, as part of that, the information about what happened last summer. In that building, they’re keeping the truth – the truth about how much they knew about the Russians and Starcourt, before it all went down. The truth about what they got out of Kline, presumably, since he’s disappeared off the radar completely.”  


Her voice was steady, her hands still, and there was not a single tear in her eyes.  


“And the truth about what they’re going to do next. And that’s what we’re going to steal.”  


There was a beat of shocked silence, and then Jonathan and Jasna both began to talk at once, two quiet voices nevertheless filling the apartment with questions.  


“Before you say anything,” said Nancy, a moment too late. “I do have a plan for how we’re going to get in and out safely. It’s after hours, for one thing, and I’ve learned enough about the place to have a decent try at bluffing our way past anyone we might encounter. We basically just need to get in, get to the room with the computer files, take pictures of the screen – Jonathan, that’s your job – and get out, before anyone notices.”  


“OK,” said Jonathan, slowly, “and what about getting in? Do they just not leave the door locked?”  


“Well,” said Nancy, “that’s where we’ll need your help, Jasna. Your father goes to this place, Longbow House, pretty often – I think he must be a legal consultant there or something like that. It’s only a hunch, but I think he must have some way of getting into the building when he goes. A key, or something.”  


Jasna appeared lost in thought.  


“Jasna?” prompted Nancy.  


The other girl shook her head slowly. “Not a key. A keycard, if this is what I think it is.”  


“You’ve seen it?” said Jonathan.  


“Maybe,” said Jasna. “This one time, when I was twelve, I was looking for my birth certificate, because I thought that if I showed it to Jen Stanton, then she’d stop telling everyone I was born in Yugoslavia, and then everyone would have to stop making jokes about it, because I was born here in Washington. And I was going around my father’s office, going through the filing cabinets to try and find it, and there was this little blue piece of plastic right at the bottom. It didn’t have anything on it, so I assumed it was just junk, and, well, I needed a bookmark anyway, so I took it.”  


Her voice took on a slightly faraway quality to it. “He was furious. Mom, too, when she found out that I’d been in his cabinet. But he was most angry about the little card, and told me that I was never to touch it again, or he wouldn’t let me outside for a full year and would get rid of all of my books. So I basically stayed out of his office, until…”  


“Until you stole the files about your friend, and gave them to Murray,” Nancy finished, nodding. “I’m sorry to ask, but do you think you’d be able to try and find that keycard again? It might well be vital to our plan here.”  


Jasna’s eyes darted around the room in unconscious stress, but she eventually nodded. “He might have moved it, hidden it somewhere, but I can have a look.”  


Nancy smiled, and put her hand on Jasna’s shoulder. “Thank you. Seriously.”  


Jasna’s face flushed slightly, and she looked at the floor, shrugging Nancy’s hand away. “It’s no trouble. As long as we’re doing it for a good cause.”  


“We are,” said Nancy. “We definitely are.”  


Jasna stood, as Nancy began to tidy the papers away into her satchel, and made her way along the corridor through to the office. Nancy rose to follow her, but Jonathan caught her arm, and said, his voice low, “Nance? Can we talk?”  


“Sure,” said Nancy in confusion. “What is it? An issue with the plan?”  


Jonathan tilted his head. “You could say that. We’re about to break into a secure government facility.”  


“And?”  


“And have you actually thought this through?”  


“Of course I have. I’ve been planning this since September, more or less – researching the facility, talking to Murray, getting in touch with Jasna, all that stuff. I’ve done my homework here, Jonathan.”  


OK,” said Jonathan, and there was an odd tone in his voice now. “And then what?”  


“Once we’ve got the documents we need,” said Nancy, “we send them to Murray, and he publicises them. He knows people who know people, and we can get this stuff – the coverups, the lying – onto the front page of the national newspapers. We can make sure that people know exactly what kind of government they’re putting their faith in.”  


“OK, great,” said Jonathan. “We can swing the midterms in November, amazing. But that’s not what I meant. What do we do then?”  


“I don’t think I’m following,” said Nancy, with a frown.  


“No,” agreed Jonathan. “I’ll be more clear. When the government finds out that we’re the ones who broke into their secret facility, when they find out that we stole and leaked their secrets, what do you think they’re going to do to us then? Try us for treason, maybe, and lock us away or send us to the electric chair? Or maybe they won’t go the official route; maybe there’ll just be a team of people knock on our door in the middle of the night with silenced pistols. Because these people, they don’t forget, and they definitely don’t forgive.”  


“I’m willing to take that risk,” said Nancy. “It’s the right thing to do.”  


“But you’re not just risking your own life,” said Jonathan, and it dawned on Nancy what that note in his voice was. It was fear.  


“Look,” she said, “you don’t have to do this, you know –“  


“I’m not talking about me, Nancy!” said Jonathan. “I’m thinking about our families! Our friends! Dammit, Nancy, everyone we’ve ever spoken to in Hawkins might be a target! When El escaped, they killed Benny Hammond because he spoke to her for a few minutes. When they found the kids at the school, they’d have shot them all if it wasn’t for the Demogorgon. They don’t care, Nancy. They don’t fucking care how many people they have to kill to keep their secrets.”  


Jonathan took a deep breath, as though he had surprised himself with the strength of his outburst. Nancy had taken a step back without realising. A silence fell over the room, broken only by the sound of Jasna opening and closing cabinet drawers.  


“That’s why I’ve got to do this,” Nancy whispered, looking Jonathan dead in the eye. “I can’t just sit here and let it happen any more.”  


“And when they come after our families?” asked Jonathan, his voice just as quiet. “What then?”  


“Well,” said Nancy. “Well, then, I’ll go to Owens, and I’ll tell him that it was all me, if they’re in danger. Once the truth is out, I’ll turn myself in. Maybe Owens will protect me, but if they need a sacrificial lamb, then that can be me.”  


“You can’t do that,” said Jonathan. The two of them were very close now, their faces almost touching.  


“You can’t stop me,” said Nancy, with a sad smile.  


They stared at each other with a new intensity, a shared knowledge, as a thousand unasked and unanswered questions passed between them, and then, quite suddenly, this was shattered, as the front door flew open.  


“…just frankly unacceptable, is what it is,” said an unfamiliar voice, a deep and angry Washington accent. “If he expects me to pick a side, then he should know that I won’t choose him, because I don’t fucking trust him.”  


“Marko,” said a woman. “Shut up. Who are you, and what are you doing in our house?”  


Nancy and Jonathan turned to face the door, where a couple stood. The man, whose name was evidently Marko, wore a suit that appeared expensive to Nancy’s admittedly undiscerning eyes, as well as a closely-trimmed and greying beard; at his side stood a tall, dark-haired woman who looked eerily similar to Jasna. Neither of them looked particularly pleased.  


Nancy was the first to recover. “Hi there! Mr and Mrs Konstanjević, I presume?”  


“You presume correctly,” said Marko. “Who are you, and – to repeat my wife’s question – what are you doing here?”  


“We’re friends of Jasna’s,” said Nancy. “From school. My name’s Anna Burbank. We’re here to go over a joint project with her.”  


“Yes,” said Jonathan. “A joint project. On literature. My name’s Jon – Johnny. Sellers. Johnny Sellers.” He offered his hand to Marko, but it was ignored, and he let his arm fall back to his side.  


“And where’s Jasna?” asked Mrs Konstanjević. “Leaving you to do all the work, I presume?”  


“No, no,” said Nancy. “She just went to the restroom – she’ll be back in a moment.”  


And, as if she had been waiting for her cue, Jasna appeared from around the corner, her hands behind her back in a polite posture. “Good evening, Mother. Good evening, Father. Did you have a nice time with your friends?”  


“Adequate,” said Marko. “I see you’ve brought your own…classmates over. Remind me, did you ask permission to invite them?”  


Jasna shook her head, looking at the floor. “Sorry. I completely forgot – the project is due soon, and –“  


“Excuses are not suitable, Jasna,” said Mrs Konstanjević. “You owe us both an apology. And your classmates will need to leave now.”  


“But they’ve only just arrived,” said Jasna. “I only finished work forty-five minutes ago, and my friends –“  


“Irrelevant,” said Mrs Konstanjević. “Your father has an important meeting tomorrow morning, and needs to sleep without any disturbance. And your classmates should not have come here in the first place. You haven’t apologised yet for inviting them.”  


“I thought that you wouldn’t be back –“ began Jasna, but was cut off  


“Jasna,” said Marko, stepping forwards into the room. “Apologise. Now.”  


There was a moment, just a single moment, full of tension, and Nancy saw the look on Marko’s face, full of anger and affront, and then Jasna stepped back, hanging her head. “I’m sorry, Father. I’m sorry, Mother. It won’t happen again.”  


“Make sure it does not,” said Mrs Konstanjević. “Although I’m surprised that it happened at all, to be perfectly honest. Why would these people want to come over to your home?”  


“We were doing a literature project,” said Jasna, her voice very soft. “On _Crime and Punishment_.”  


“Yes, of course,” said Marko. “Here to hold your hand and help you with schoolwork. Not because they want to be here with you. You need to remember this.”  


“I’m sorry, Father,” repeated Jasna. “I’ll walk them back home.” She picked up her coat from the back of the chair, where it had been left, and shrugged it on.  


“Yes, fine,” said Mrs Konstanjević. “Now, Marko, we need to talk about Samuel’s opinions on the Contras. Quite how he expects to gain the President’s respect on this…”  


Jasna, hurriedly, ushered Nancy and Jonathan out into the hallway, and down the flight of stairs leading to the outside.  


“Are you alright?” asked Jonathan, as soon as the door had closed. “Are they always like that?”  


“Oh, yes,” said Jasna, trying to smile, her tone aiming for serenity and landing on bitterness. “They weren’t actually that bad tonight. I thought for sure they’d have words with me about working on Sunday.”  


Jonathan glanced at Nancy over Jasna’s head, and she could see the sympathy in his eyes.  


“They shouldn’t treat you like that,” he said. “Mocking you like that, making you apologise for everything. You deserve better.”  


“It’s OK,” said Jasna. “They’re just – just a bit strict, is all. It’s fine. And, on the plus side, it does mean that they weren’t expecting this.”  


From the sleeve of her coat, she produced a small, blue, piece of plastic, the size of a cigarette carton. In regular black writing, it read, _Longbow House – Keycard No. 19_.  


Jasna grinned, and Nancy found herself smiling too.  


*******  


_So this is it_ , Lucas thought to himself. _This is where I die. In a forest, at the top of a mountain in West Virginia, eaten by a monster._  


By the sounds of it, Dustin was having similar thoughts, but unlike Lucas was not refraining from voicing them, muttering “Shit, shit, God, shit,” under his breath in a strange catechism. Lucas elbowed him and shook his head frantically, and Dustin fell silent, instead turning to stare at him with a clear question in his eyes.  


“Climb,” whispered Lucas. “We need to climb.”  


“Climb what? Go further up the mountain? Why’s that going to help?”  


“The trees, dumbass,” said Lucas. “It’s what you’re supposed to do if a bear is chasing you.”  


Dustin blinked, and nodded. The sun was up now, shining orange rays over the peaks to their east, although the town in the valley still lay in shadow, as did much of the hillside beneath them. “Are you saying that you think this is a bear?”  


Lucas pursed his lips. “God, I wish it was a bear. That would be really lovely right now.”  


He glanced around for a nearby tree that appeared vaguely climbable, and eventually spotted one. Beckoning Dustin over, he knotted his hands together, and boosted his friend’s leg up, allowing him to climb into the tree, and then scrambled after him. They climbed through the thicket of bare wood and winter-dead leaves, pulling themselves up into the sparse and thin branches at the top of the tree, and – as they looked down – they saw the creature moving towards them, stealthy and silent on the forest floor.  


Dustin let out an involuntary, half-stifled gasp, and Lucas, hazily aware of his immediate surroundings, felt his hands and arms clench around the tree until the bark cut into his skin. And they watched, helpless, motionless, as the creature prowled closer and closer.  


Its skin was a dark, muddy, grey, with an oily sort of sheen to it, reflecting and shimmering in the dappled sunlight. It walked on four long, thin, limbs which each tapered to a point, where three long fleshy claws extended into the ground, and a short spiny tail protruded from its rear. All across the body of the creature, a strange organic movement could be seen, like muscles contracting and dilating beneath the skin; but no muscles could have moved like that, colliding and fracturing like icebergs in a frozen sea, spreading and shifting like colonies upon colonies of ants. Across its left side, a long dark scar extended, which seemed to have only knitted itself together recently and imperfectly.  


But the head, now, that was very familiar, as the creature looked up into the trees, and its face opened like a flower as it let out a high shriek.  


“It’s looking at us,” whispered Dustin. “Lucas, it’s looking right at us.”  


“Yeah, thanks,” said Lucas.  


“It’s a monster from the Upside-Down, and it’s seen us, and it’s the size of a fucking garage door –“  


“Dustin, shut up, I can see it too.”  


There was a brief, heavy pause. The creature took another few steps towards the tree, folding its petal-like mouth in again, and cocked its head in what looked like calculation.  


“You think it can’t climb?” asked Dustin. “Like bears can’t?”  


“Erm, yeah,” said Lucas, his mouth dry. “Now that you mention, I think I might have remembered wrong about the bears.”  


Another pause.  


“Oh, well, that’s just great,” muttered Dustin. “So what are you supposed to do, then? If a bear attacks you?”  


Lucas looked incredulously at him. “Does it really matter right now? Like, I don’t know if you noticed, but that’s clearly not a bear, man.”  


“OK, OK, I just thought –“  


But whatever Dustin just thought, Lucas did not learn, for at that moment, the creature leapt into the air, springing with the grace of a much smaller thing, right towards the two of them, and its face fell open as it rose towards them. Lucas’s eyes, instinctively, closed for a half-second, and by the time they were open again, the creature was back on the floor, scrambling for purchase.  


“Oh, God, son of a bitch,” said Dustin again. “That was far too close.”  


Lucas nodded. “You think it’ll get bored? Leave us alone?”  


“So we’re assuming that it can’t climb, then?”  


“Well,” said Lucas. “Here’s what I’m thinking. If it can, then we’re dead, so let’s assume that it can’t.”  


“Wow,” said Dustin. “You want to study philosophy in college, and you’re saying things like that?”  


The creature leapt again, and let out another shriek, but fell a metre short. If Lucas had particularly wanted to, he could probably have reached out and touched it at the zenith of its jump.  


“Do you know,” said Dustin, almost conversationally, “I really can’t see a way out of this.”  


“We wait for it to go and hunt something else?”  


Dustin shook his head. “Come on. I know how stories work. The monster doesn’t just get bored and wander off.”  


It paced in circles around the tree, its claws scoring scratches into the soil. And then, just a second after the horrifying idea had occurred to Lucas, it took a few steps back, and then charged at the tree, throwing its body against the trunk.  


The tree shook, but did not fall. Dustin and Lucas exchanged terrified stares, and then, as if they were both operating on the same thought process, began to grab branches and pieces of bark, and to throw them down at the creature. It appeared unperturbed, turning and lining itself up for another charge.  


A small part of Lucas’s brain, rather unhelpfully, took the opportunity to remind him that Bilbo Baggins had been in a very similar situation at one point, trapped by goblins on all sides and perched at the top of a pine in the foothills of the Misty Mountains. _Fifteen birds in five fir-trees…_ But he shook his head, and grabbed another piece of bark to hurl, because despite what Dustin said, this was not a story, and you couldn’t always escape on the back of an eagle; sometimes you had to just do whatever you could to make sure that you didn’t die doing absolutely nothing.  


And a shot split the silence of the woods, the sound of a shotgun, echoing off the mountainside, and the creature screamed.  


Another shot rang out, and Lucas whipped his head around, staring into the rising sun, and saw a figure striding towards them, a gun in their arms and another one over their back. The creature let out another shriek, the sound of pain rather than the sound of hunger or of glee, and backed away slightly, taking two steps away from the tree.  


A third shot thudded into the floor just in front of it, and it seemed to consider its situation for a moment, then turned and sprinted away with an unearthly speed and grace. Lucas’s knuckles were taut again, and his heart was hammering away in his chest, but this time with a strange mixture of relief and elation, not fear.  


The figure strode closer, and the shadows fell away from their face.  


“Murray?” said Lucas. “Murray Bauman?”  


“Yeah, nice to see you too, kid,” said Murray. “Now get down from that tree, and get up to my RV. I don’t know what the hell that thing was, but it might come back at any point, and I’m not standing out here in the cold any longer than I have to.”  


*******  


The phone rang, and, before she could really think about what she was doing, Robin’s hand shot out and grabbed it before the first ring had finished. Steve had risen from his chair as well on instinct, and Erica – who had been fetching herself a glass of water – had frozen to the spot, letting the tap run and run, the water flowing over the top of her glass and down her sleeve.  


“Hello?” came a familiar voice. One of the kids. Mike, she thought. “Mr Sinclair? Is that you?”  


Robin cleared her throat nervously. “He’s not in at the moment. It’s me – Robin. Are you alright?”  


“I’m alright,” said Mike, and his tone was strange, loud somehow, as if he was shouting into the phone, although there was no background noise. “Max is here with me. We’re in –“ he said something inaudible to someone else for a moment, and then continued – “West Virginia, at a military base. They saved the two of us from something on the road, and we’ve been helping them out with a few questions, but they’re letting us go now, so can you come and pick us up?”  


Robin was not quite sure what to say. Steve shot her an inquiring look, and she just blinked at him, trying to convey the notion that something strange was going on here, even if she couldn’t quite put her finger on what.  


“They might want to ask you a few questions as well,” said Mike, now speaking quite carefully. “They’ve given us a guarantee of your safety, don’t worry. I trust them to honour that.”  


And Robin realised. She didn’t know the Wheeler kid particularly well, but she knew them as a group, as a single entity, and Steve’s brood, as a rule, did not trust the government to honour any promise that wasn’t written on a banknote.  


“I understand,” she simply said. _I understand that you’re being held hostage. I understand that they want to trade you for something._ “What do they need to know from me? I don’t really –“  


“It’s about the summer,” said Mike, quickly. “About how you found those secret Russian documents in the mall, and how you stumbled onto their plan to try and create some kind of soldiers from the creatures. They want to know everything.”  


_Translation: we need you to play along with whatever insane lie we’ve cooked up, without being able to go through the whole thing with you. God, I wish I’d taken an improv class or something._  


“Is it just me that they want to hear from?” she asked. “Because I didn’t understand most of it; you probably know as much as I do.”  


There was another brief period of muttering at the other end, then Mike, failing to entirely mask a slight annoyance, said, “They want Steve to come as well. They know that you two made it into the Russian base somehow.”  


Robin mouthed a few swear words.  


“What?” asked Steve. “Who is it? What do they want? Is it the kids?”  


She turned to him. “I’ll tell you later. The army’s got two of them.”  


“Robin, are you still there?” asked Mike.  


“Yep, still here. Did you say that they wanted the documents?”  


“Yeah?” said Mike, clearly not sure where she was going with this.  


“Because we already gave most of them to the government, afterwards,” said Robin, crossing her fingers against the phone. “Or someone who said he was from the government. After the fire, when we got out, when they were treating us for shock. He had some official papers on him, I think.” _There we go. Maybe that’ll get them tied up in bureaucracy, or get them to think that the Russians got them back, or something. Or maybe they’ll see through this immediately and arrest us._  


There was more muttering at the end of the phone, and then a new voice came onto the line. “Miss Buckley, isn’t it? My name’s Jack Beeching; I’m in charge of the official investigation into the various Hawkins events over the last couple of years. Do you remember anything else about this man?”  


Robin bit her lip quietly, then said, “It was a long night, sir, so I don’t remember too much. I think he had brown hair, going a bit bald? Quite short, sort of overweight, wearing normal clothes? Not really much of an accent?” _Right, that’s around two-thirds of the American male population right there._  


“Interesting,” said Beeching. “That’s very helpful, thank you. You said most of the documents?”  


_Damn._ “There’s still a couple of other ones, but they’re pretty battered. Steve found them in his pockets a couple of days afterwards. Do you want them as well?”  


“What do they say?” said Beeching.  


“I’m not sure, sir,” Robin replied. “I don’t speak Russian.”  


“Ah. Yes, that’s fair enough, I suppose. Bring them along anyway when you come to collect these two, and we’ll take care of them from there. Has anyone else seen them?”  


“Not that I know of,” she said. “Whereabouts are you? Where are we driving to?”  


“There’s a town called Ansted, down on US-60,” said Beeching. “We’ll hand the kids over to you there, by the post office. Security, and all that.” He chuckled genially. “Plus, the tracks up through the mountains to our little installation are quite rough, and I wouldn’t want you damaging your car. It’s four or five hours’ drive for you, I think, so we’ll see you just before dinnertime.”  


The phone made a clicking noise, replaced with a flat tone. Robin, her hands shaking slightly, returned it to its cradle.  


“What’s going on?” said Erica. “What’s the situation?”  


Robin took a deep breath, and sat down. “Mike and Max are in a military base in West Virginia. They’ll trade them back for some secret Russian documents, if we drive down there to meet them. Me and Steve, that is, since they definitely know about us.”  


“What secret Russian documents?” said Steve, as Erica’s face fell at the lack of any mention of Lucas.  


“The secret Russian documents that we stole from the base, back in the summer.”  


“But – I don’t remember stealing any –“ Steve, absurdly, began to look around the Sinclairs’ kitchen, as though a Soviet military plan might have been covertly pinned to the noticeboard in the corner.  


“Relax, dingus,” Robin sighed, although she felt anything but. “It’s a five-hour drive. Hopefully I’ll be able to fake something up by the time we get there. If not, then…” She tailed off.  


Steve gritted his teeth, took a deep breath of his own, and stood up, retrieving his car keys from an inner pocket of his jacket. “And no Dustin or Lucas? You’re sure?”  


Robin nodded. “Mike made a big deal of it being just the two of them. Hopefully, that means that the others managed to escape. Erica, we’ll need you to stay here, in case they try and get in touch. We’ll phone you from a gas station or something, to check in.”  


Erica, fear and determination warring in her face, nodded.  


“As for us,” said Robin, turning to Steve, “let’s go and save two of your adopted children from the army. God, if only I’d applied for that job at the diner instead last summer, then my life would make a hell of a lot more sense.”  


*******  


The base at Klyuchi had become a hive of activity in the last few days, and Nikolay didn’t understand most of it. Ignat’ev and Gorikhin, and the other scientists, had been working fourteen-hour days in their laboratories and offices, scrawling out equations that didn’t seem to contain a single number, and generally looking displeased with the results. Under Stepanov’s command, a team of military engineers had showed up one morning in the vast chamber containing the Gate, and had started to construct various vehicles and machines for use on the other side of the glowing red opening.  


They were building a base, a colony in the other dimension. The Shadow World, people were beginning to call it.  


First, they sent through a large amount of high explosive, and turned off the Key device for a short period of time, causing the Gate to flicker out of existence as though it had never existed in the first place. When they turned it back on again, it opened up on a large crater, no longer underground, beneath a leaden sky.  


Next, they sent through a couple of people in spacesuits. There was some debate about whether the air was entirely safe or not; in terms of its chemical composition, it was more or less identical to the atmosphere of Earth, and there was no sign of radioactivity, but, nevertheless, miners’ canaries fainted when exposed to it for too long, and the wall surrounding the Gate had already begun to show signs of corrosion. So the first explorers in the Shadow World wore the old cast-offs of the cosmonauts’ missions, for safety’s sake, and when they returned, they brought back wild tales and vivid descriptions.  


Ash, or something like ash, constantly falling and floating in the sky. Rivers made of a thick, sludgy darkness, which the labs insisted showed no chemical differences from ordinary water. Trees as tall as apartment buildings, weeds as tall as houses, each and every one of them brown and grey rather than green. And creatures, too, their folding faces decorated with teeth and thorns, grotesque parodies of real animals.  


Everything they had found so far had its equivalent in the real world, it seemed. And, as Nikolay had been considering, and as he had mentioned to Dr Ignat’ev during one of the scientist’s infrequent meal breaks, this rather raised the question of where the humans were, or their counterparts.  


Nikolay hadn’t expected Yermolay Ilyich to go as pale as he did, and definitely wasn’t prepared for what his friend told him. Somehow, and Ignat’ev wasn’t entirely sure how, they’d managed to get their hands on a creature that the military referred to as Entity Nine, and that the scientists referred to as the Flower-Shark. Stepanov was keeping it in the basement, apparently, and had been conducting his version of a scientific study upon it, which seemed to involve feeding prisoners to it and watching the results from a window on high.  


“It’s just a theory, obviously,” said Ignat’ev, his voice hushed as he chased the final vegetables around his bowl of borsch. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Flower-Shark is that counterpart you’re talking about.”  


“The people of the Shadow World,” muttered Nikolay. “Are you sure? Couldn’t it be something else?”  


Ignat’ev’s eyes darkened. “I’ve heard about how it tears people apart, how it lets them suffer before killing them. It might just be an animal, but there’s malice there, far more than simple hunger. It enjoys watching the pain. No, that’s our shadow human, right there.”  


Nikolay thought about Stepanov, watching the creature as it fed, and silently nodded. _As above, so below._  


On the second day after the construction began, Brenner spoke to him. They were in the grand hall, overlooking the Gate and the things surrounding it – the great glass chamber in the centre of the room, from which the Key was operated; the rows and rows of desks and circuitboards; the half-completed light aircraft and vehicles, which the military engineers were beginning to send through to the Shadow World – and, flanked by his two guards, the American walked up to Nikolay as though he were strolling in the park, and asked, “What do you think is an acceptable price for progress?”  


Nikolay surveyed the man, dressed still in prison clothes, but wearing them with an ease that showed that he was not too concerned by his status. “Why do you ask?”  


“I get bored with the company of these two,” said Brenner, with a thin smile. “They are not the sort of people who enjoy matters of philosophy. Very few here are, it seems. Are you?”  


“Sometimes,” said Nikolay, slowly. “It’s hard to avoid it completely.”  


“Then you must have an answer to my question,” said Brenner. “What price should be paid?”  


“That rather depends,” said Nikolay. “Who’s paying?”  


“I’m sorry?” said Brenner, with a polite smile.  


“Are you the one to pay the price?” asked Nikolay. “Will you put your own neck on the line for progress? Will you shoulder the risks of revolution, the losses and hardships? Or will you let others pay?”  


“A very interesting question,” said Brenner, as though he were noticing Nikolay for the first time. “And, of course, I would shoulder the risks myself. It would be cowardly to do otherwise.” He pointed to his ruined face. “Observe these scars. Given to me by a distant cousin of Entity Nine, back in America. I was almost killed, only survived through luck. But such are the risks that a man of science – a revolutionary, you say – must accept.”  


“I see,” said Nikolay. “And the children?”  


“I beg your pardon?”  


“The ones you experimented on,” Nikolay continued, “back when you weren’t a prisoner. The ones you took from their families, and turned into test subjects.” His voice was growing bolder now. “The children that you kept in a laboratory for years, drugging them and sedating them, messing with their brains in the hope that this one, maybe this next one, would be the one to develop psychic powers. Yermolay told me all about your work. We all know what you did in America. That’s why nobody’s particularly interested in debating philosophy with you, why people move away when you come near. Everyone here in Klyuchi knows what you are.”  


“I don’t think you understand,” said Brenner. “Not all risks can be taken on by the scientist alone. I needed to work with a very particular kind of person at first, in the hope that all humanity could benefit from the results. So that I could create a new race, a better race. The next stage.”  


Nikolay nodded. “And so you tortured children. And you think that that’s an acceptable price for progress?”  


“Yes,” said Dr Brenner, zeal in his eyes. “I do.”  


“Well,” said Nikolay, “I don’t. And I’d rather live in a world of subpar, ordinary people, than your world of superhumans, if it’s built on that.”  


Brenner said nothing, but smiled ironically, and turned away.  


“Oh, are you off?” asked Nikolay. “Something I said?”  


“It’s nothing personal, Nikolay,” said Brenner. “Stepanov has ordered me to go through the Gate, to test the suitability of the other dimension for humans not wearing a spacesuit. I do hope that we can talk more when I return.”  


He sketched a bow, and walked towards the Gate, where a group of soldiers were standing, ready to send him into the Shadow World. But when he returned, three hours later, Nikolay was not particularly disappointed to see that he seemed in no mood to converse, blood dripping from his left arm and a drained expression on his face.  


As Brenner was escorted away, Nikolay noticed someone else watching him go, the glass chamber between them, and realised that it was Vosemov. But something seemed wrong, even stranger than normal, about the blond soldier; in the refraction of the glass, and in the shimmering light cast by the Gate, Vosemov’s form seemed to sway and dance, somehow indistinct. And then the soldier turned on his heel, heading back towards their quarters, and Nikolay – acting on sheer impulsiveness – followed.  


As he walked through the tunnels, the maze of corridors and hallways that made up the Klyuchi complex, the thought would not leave his mind. _Something is wrong with Ivan Ivanovich Vosemov._  


Since that first day in the aircraft hangar, he had noticed the signs. The soldier never spoke, which Nikolay and Ignat’ev had both assumed to be a legacy of American torture; Gorikhin had said that they had threatened to cut his tongue out when they were interrogating him, and they had presumed that the threat had been followed through with for Vosemov. Not only did he never speak, but he never interacted in any other way with the other residents of the base, except when unavoidable.  


Now that he came to think of it, there were other strange things about Vosemov. His movements were normally fluid and graceful, but Nikolay remembered the way that he had stepped off the plane at Rovaniemi, like a newly-born deer. He had spent the entirety of that flight huddled away from Nikolay, refusing to go within a good thirty centimetres of him despite being in the next seat along. And he didn’t blink either, or at least not that Nikolay had seen; he just watched everything with a stone-cold glare.  


Nikolay was moving on silent feet now, by reflex as much as anything. The existence of alternate dimensions and their impending military conquest by the Soviet Union might have come as something of a shock to him, but now he was back on familiar terrain, following someone through an official site, trying to uncover buried secrets and interesting morsels of information. He could do this bit.  


Vosemov almost noticed him outside his quarters, but Nikolay froze in position in the alcove of a door, and prepared himself to appear as though he had just stepped out of it if he was spotted, and eventually, the danger passed. Looking around, the blond soldier opened the door to his cell, and stepped through, closing it behind him. Nikolay, silently, made his way to the door, and peered through the keyhole.  


It was not clear at first what was going on, since Vosemov was still standing quite close to the door, but as he moved further away, Nikolay began to see more clearly. And he did not understand what he could see.  


It was not Vosemov in that room, despite the fact that the soldier had stepped through that door no more than five seconds ago. Vosemov was nowhere to be seen. Instead, sinking down to sit on the bed in exhaustion, was a woman that Nikolay had never seen before in his life.  


He knew on some level that it was a bad idea, that a good spy would keep watching and would leave without being seen, but this was not normal spycraft, not a normal situation. This was just weird. So, one hand on his gun, he pushed the door open, and entered, saying, “Who the hell are you?  


The woman’s head snapped around in fear, and – almost before he had finished his question – the image of Vosemov rapidly reassembled itself around her form. In little more than a half-second, she had gone, and the blond soldier sat in her place, staring up at him with blank hostility. But, before Nikolay could entirely register what had just happened, the form dissolved again, and the woman was back, blood pouring from her nose, and the clear signs of panic and indecision on her face.  


“Shit,” she said, in English.  


Nikolay blinked.  


“Shit,” she repeated to herself, in an almost matter-of-fact tone.  


“I’ll repeat the question,” said Nikolay, also in English. His voice was calm and collected, even while his brain was screaming several questions at him about what was happening. “Who are you? You’re not Ivan Ivanovich Vosemov.”  


“No,” agreed the woman. She clicked her fingers, and – out of the corner of his eye – Nikolay saw the door silently swing closed behind him. “My name is Kali Prasad. And I swear that I can explain everything.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you to everyone who's made it this far - I do hope you're all enjoying the story! Please don't hesitate to comment if you have any queries, suggestions, theories, or just things that you'd like to say - I'm always interested to hear from my readership!


	6. Going Underground

The prison cell was bright and cold.  


It wasn’t technically a prison cell, Beeching had reassured them before leaving. According to the older man, the pair of them were being temporarily confined, for their own safety, in a secure meeting room, generally used for briefings and meetings between senior staff on the base. The door was locked, yes, but that was a perfectly sensible precaution to prevent them from leaving the room and getting lost, or stumbling onto unsafe areas (he had not specified who would be at danger here). Likewise, the lack of windows was nothing to worry about; they merely happened to be in the centre of a building, and possibly underground, although this had been left somewhat unclear. And yes, they were still tied to their chairs, but again, this was purely for their own safety; free to walk around the room, they might have injured themselves, and there were no other comfortable places to sit, so, really, they may as well just stay in the chairs.  


Mike had stopped listening some time around the third round of excuses and lies.  


Steve and Robin were on their way, it seemed, from what Beeching had been saying on the phone, bringing a set of entirely fictitious (he presumed) documents to exchange for him and Max. He hoped that he had managed to convey his plan to them, and hoped as well that the details they would be forced to invent when they were questioned did not contradict the ones that had already been mentioned.  


Because they would be questioned as well, Mike had no doubt, either there at the exchange site, or possibly after being forcibly brought back here to the base. Beeching seemed perfectly reasonable, or at least had made a great effort to try and appear like a reasonable human being, but the deception and pretence could only go so far in the circumstances. And, even if they had not been drugged and captured and interrogated, Mike doubted that he would have trusted Beeching anyway. There was something about him that made Mike nervous, and that something was a military uniform.  


So he sat, tied to his chair, only half paying attention to the outside world, as he frantically sorted through plans and gambits in his head, trying to find a way to get them all out of there, all safe. And nothing was coming up.  


It was difficult to plan when all of your choices and options were constrained. It was difficult to escape when there was a rope around each limb. And it was extremely, extremely difficult to summon the imagination necessary for a task like this – an imagination that, until a couple of years ago, had been used solely for developing campaigns and encounters with fictional dragons – when you were aware of the stakes.  


Beeching knew about Winterton. He knew where to find El and Will and the others. He knew everyone involved in Hawkins, and he apparently knew a whole raft of details about their personal lives, with the exception of everything covered in the non-disclosure arrangements that Owens had repeatedly made them all sign. And, if Mike made the slightest slip, the merest error, then all of that would be in the firing line of a man who appeared to have a nervous tic in his trigger finger.  


“Please shut up,” said Max, and Mike was abruptly, unwillingly, returned to reality.  


“I didn’t say anything?” he replied, not entirely sure whether this was true or not. It turned out that chloroform-induced sleep was not nearly as restful as the real thing.  


“You were breathing,” she said. “Really quite obnoxiously loud.”  


“It wasn’t deliberate,” said Mike, irritation creeping into his voice. “I was thinking.”  


“Well, stop,” said Max. “Nobody asked for that.”  


“Oh, just stop breathing, sure,” said Mike. “I’ll just asphyxiate myself here, shall I, so that I’m not bothering you any more – sound good to you?”  


“Yeah, actually,” said Max. Her voice was an alloy of tiredness and aggression. “Might have saved us all a lot of trouble if I’d asked you earlier, actually.”  


“Oh? How much earlier were you thinking?”  


“Oh, I don’t know, maybe two years or so?”  


They were both beginning to raise their voices now, and both appeared to realise this at around the same time. Mike tried to turn to face her, but was held in place by the ropes fastening him down; fruitlessly, he began trying to shuffle the chair around.  


“You know what?” he said, and he was impressed by how calm his voice was. “Fine. Neither of us seem to be going anywhere any time soon, so let’s have it out, here and now. What the hell is your problem with me, exactly?”  


Max let out a startled, sharp, half-laugh, and then said, “My problem? You think I’m the one with the problem?”  


“Well, I’m not a medical doctor, but I’m pretty sure –“  


“Oh, shut the hell up, Wheeler, you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are. I mean that I’m not the one that hates you. That’s always gone the other way round.”  


Mike paused for a moment, taking stock, and desperately trying to remember exactly what they had told Beeching in their story a couple of hours earlier, so as not to slip. Then he said, “That’s not true, and you know it. Last summer, with – with Jane – you deliberately turned her against me. Just for your own amusement, and your own petty little hatred.”  


“I absolutely did not,” said Max, and her voice was quiet now, venomous. “Could you even see yourself last summer? You were keeping Jane caged up like a little canary, and couldn’t handle it when she wanted to talk to other people. I just told her that she didn’t have to live like that.”  


“You did a hell of a lot more than that,” said Mike, matching her tone. “You pushed her into dumping me; you didn’t even tell her what that actually meant. And then every time I expressed concern for her safety, like a normal decent human being, you turned on me again and said that I was trying to tell her what to do. So how come it was fine for you to make her decisions for her?”  


“Fuck you, Wheeler,” Max replied. “If you think I was controlling her like some sort of puppet, if you think that she only broke up with you because I made her, then I guess you really do have no respect for her after all. She can make her own decisions.”  


“I know she can!” shouted Mike. “I’m very aware of that, thank you! I actually know what she’s like, rather than just seeing her as a pawn to use against me!”  


“Is that seriously what you think?” said Max. “You really think she’s not my friend as well? You really think I only cared about her as far as I could use her to attack you? The whole fucking world doesn’t revolve around you, Wheeler.”  


And the memory hit Mike with the force of a sledgehammer. Will, a few days ago, sitting on that log in the forest by Winterton. _Mike, not everything is about you_ , he’d said, and then he’d walked away, left him sitting there with shock in his veins and one fewer friend.  


He wasn’t sure what to say. He wasn’t sure how to start trying to find the right words.  


“Wow,” said Max. “Really didn’t expect that to come as a shock to you, but here we are.”  


“Max, just – just shut up, seriously,” said Mike. He wasn’t angry any more, just tired, tired and uncertain about everything. “If you’re so determined to hate me, then go for it, fucking knock yourself out. Just leave me out of it.”  


Max fell silent, but then, in a somewhat quieter voice, said, “I’m not, you know. Determined, that is. I don’t exactly enjoy this. But like I say, here we are.”  


“Then why do you?” said Mike.  


“Oh, I don’t know,” said Max. “Maybe because you never gave me a single reason to like you? Because you banned me from joining your stupid Party, and kept me in the dark about everything last winter; because of everything with Jane last summer? Because you made it very clear, again and again, that you didn’t want me around?”  


An automatic retort leapt to Mike’s tongue, but, somehow, he swallowed it, and then said, quietly, “I apologised for that. For last winter. After the Gate was closed. I wasn’t exactly myself back then.”  


“You apologised?” said Max. “You think? I mean, sure, you said that I was a decent driver, and you said that I wasn’t the worst person in the world for Lucas to date, but you seriously think that’s an apology? Especially when you basically avoided me for the next several months?”  


“I definitely said more than that,” protested Mike, whilst racking his brains to try and remember any specifics.  


“You definitely didn’t,” replied Max, but she sounded just as uncertain as he felt.  


A silence fell between them. Mike, finally, managed to gain some purchase on the polished white floor, and shuffled the chair around so that he was facing her.  


“I mean,” she continued, “I wasn’t asking you to beg my forgiveness or anything. But you just pretended that it hadn’t happened, that you hadn’t been a colossal dick to me on numerous occasions. Just a single apology would have been nice.”  


“I was trying to show you that I was sorry,” said Mike. “By being comfortable around you, and stuff like that.”  


“Huh,” said Max. “Maybe your species, you know, just sucks at apologising.”  


Mike laughed.  


A second later, he realised what he had done, and saw the confused, almost horrified, expression on Max’s face.  


“Did you –“ she began.  


“No!” shouted Mike.  


There was another brief silence.  


“Did you just laugh at a joke that I made?” she repeated.  


“Well, only a bit,” said Mike. “It wasn’t amazing or anything. And not deliberately.”  


The silence returned, but it was different now. It had stopped being a battleground.  


“Lucas told me,” said Max, hesitantly, uncertainly, “that you guys have a rule. One of your weird dungeon pacts. About first blood.”  


Mike nodded. “You draw first blood, you shake hands. If you’re the one that started it, you’ve got to be the one to apologise. Dustin insisted on it after this one time when Lucas murdered Will’s cleric by accident, because a beholder had dominated –“  


“OK, OK, I don’t need the whole story,” said Max. “But, erm, do you think – do you think we could do that?”  


“Well, that would involve deciding who had drawn first blood,” said Mike. “Deciding who started this.”  


“Which sounds like it was kind of the problem all along,” agreed Max.  


Mike chewed absently on his lip for a moment, and then said, “Well, what if we didn’t have to decide? I mean, it must have been one of us, so…”  


“So if we both apologise,” continued Max, “at the same time, then the right person must have done it. And then your nerd gods won’t come and claim our souls for breaking their commandments.”  


“Pelor,” muttered Mike. “God of the sun. Patron deity of Will the Wise.” He paused. “But, yeah. That sounds like it might work.”  


“On three?” said Max.  


Mike nodded, then shook his head. “Wait, hold on, you mean when you get to the number three, or after three? Or are you counting down rather than up?”  


“I am so close to never apologising to you for anything ever,” said Max, but there was a ghost of a smile on her face.  


She counted down.  


“I’m sorry,” they both said.  


The next few minutes were filled with a deeply awkward silence, with neither of them wanting to be the first person to talk, and both apparently unable to think of a topic of conversation, so they both avoided each other’s eyes and sat in their prison cell. Finally – mercifully – the door swung open, and a soldier entered.  


“Your friends are here,” he said. “It’s time to go.”  


*******  


The three of them walked through the large double doors into the library, and El was immediately struck by just how big it was.  


As buildings went, it wasn’t massive. The school was larger, of course, and so were shops; even Mike’s house, back in Hawkins, was probably on a similar scale. But those buildings all had walls and rooms in them, and this one did not – just shelves, slightly taller than Will and Josh and significantly taller than her, across the whole floor. And it was a matter of context as well – the library seemed large because its purpose was simply to contain books, and it had enough of them that she could spend a lifetime working her way through them, books on every subject, from stories about criminals and policemen to dry factual tomes about something called ‘phylogenetic classification’, whatever that might be.  


Will and Josh did not seem to be quite as awestruck as she was. They had presumably been to a lot of other libraries before.  


Josh strode up to the desk, all sunny confidence, and greeted one of the librarians there, with Will trailing in his wake. “Hi, Mrs Terling! How are you today?”  


“Coşkun! How lovely to see you!” said the woman, looking genuinely delighted. She was even shorter than El was, and wore a bright gold dress and a red headscarf, contrasting brilliantly with the darkness of her skin. “I’m wonderful, thank you, dear – and I see you’ve brought some friends along today?”  


“Will and El Byers,” said Josh, pointing at each of them in turn. Will offered her a nervous wave. “We’re here for a school project, sort of thing – would you be able to tell us where the newspapers are kept?”  


“Right this way, dear,” said Mrs Terling, ushering them through the empty library. “They’re just in that little alcove at the side there – all of the local ones, and most national ones as well. Will that be enough?”  


Will nodded politely, and Josh said, “That’s excellent – thanks!” El gave the woman a small smile as she walked past, back to the desk, and it was returned much stronger.  


“Right,” said Josh. “Disappearances, then? We need to look for if people have gone missing?”  


“Yes,” said El. “Anything like that. Recently.”  


“Look for missing-persons adverts,” suggested Will. “They sometimes do those; the ‘have-you-seen-this-person’ sort of thing. Maybe.” He withdrew back into himself.  


“Or anything about power,” said El.  


“Power?” asked Josh, a quizzical look on his face.  


“Power and light,” said El, nodding. “Like on the vans.”  


“She means electricity,” clarified Will. “Anything about power outages, or new systems being put in place, or anything like that.”  


“OK, cool,” said Josh. “Missing people or the maintenance of the electrical power grid. Those two close cousins in terms of the news cycle. Should be easy to find.”  


“Are you always like this?” asked El.  


“Like what?”  


“Sarcastic. When you say things that are obviously not true.” That had been the word of the day on the hundredth day of her living with Hopper. He’d said that it would be quite useful to bear in mind for the next hundred.  


Josh rubbed his eyes slightly, and momentarily looked several years older. “Sort of, yeah. But especially when I’m confused, or on the outside of something.”  


“Listen,” said Will, looking Josh in the eye, “I’m sorry about the secrecy. We both are. We’ll explain everything when we can, but this isn’t a safe place. But later.”  


Josh stared back at him, his eyes somewhat wider than normal. “Everything? You’ll tell me everything?”  


“I promise,” said Will.  


El was still not very good with words. Yes, she had learnt a lot by now; she could speak in _complex sentences_ and _subordinate clauses_ , and could use _synonyms_ for words whenever she felt like it. But it was still not enough, in a lot of ways; her thoughts came in fully-formed and complete ideas rather than in words, and when she dreamed, it was silent just as often as not. Expressions, now, that was more her ballpark; even though this was a learned skill just as much as the words were, it came much more naturally. It was a lot easier to look at someone’s face and imagine how they might be feeling than to decipher all of the pointless codes that people insisted on speaking with, to pick apart the meanings of each word.  


But the shared expression on the faces of Josh and Will, as they looked at one another, was something entirely new and unfamiliar, something she had never seen from the outside before, and she had no words to describe it at all.  


Then the moment passed, as quickly as it had come, and Will stood up like his chair was burning him. “I’m going to get some paper. For writing. If we find anything.” And with that, he was off, striding between the shelves to the front desk.  


El watched Josh watching Will, and said, “He means it.”  


“What?”  


“His promise. To tell you what’s happening. We both will.”  


Josh must have heard the intensity in her voice, because he cocked his head, and said, “You trust me enough, then? I mean, this is clearly a big deal, so…”  


“It’s his rule,” said El. “Our rule. Friends don’t lie.”  


Josh was quiet for a second, and then said, “So, we’re friends, then? Like, it’s an officially recognised thing?”  


El nodded. “Friends.”  


It did not take them very long to find the first disappearance, in a newspaper from last week. A man named Eric J. Forester had been down at the docks in the evening with his friends. They’d been drinking. When they parted ways for the night, Forester had gone off on his own, trying to take a short cut through the forest to his house. His wife reported him as missing the next day.  


“Mountain lion,” said Josh, immediately.  


“There are lions here?” said El, remembering the pictures she’d seen before.  


“No, there aren’t,” said Will. “We’re nowhere near the mountains, for one thing. And the search team would have found something, surely.”  


Josh nodded in agreement. “OK, maybe it’s your thing, then.”  


“Another one,” said El, pointing to a second newspaper. “John Whitworth. Five days ago.”  


“Yeah, but he was found two days later,” said Josh. “Says so here. Claimed to have no memory of where he’d been.”  


“And I think we saw Forester, as well,” said Will, hesitantly. “When we were out with the others, on Friday. The face looks familiar.”  


“So, maybe it’s not a problem, after all,” suggested Josh. “I mean, if they’re not actually going missing…”  


“No,” said El.  


Josh raised his eyebrows, inquisitively.  


“Billy came back,” she said, mostly to Will. “The lifeguard came back. _You_ came back.”  


Will stiffened, and El could tell that he was remembering the winter of 1984, the cold air on an empty field, the shadow surrounding and invading him. Finally, he nodded.  


“It’s taking people,” she continued. “One by one. All across Winterton.”  


“So we need to find who else is going missing,” said Josh. “See if there’s a pattern, I guess?”  


“Did you say missing?”  


Mrs Terling’s kindly voice came from behind them, and they spun around as one. She smiled apologetically.  


“Sorry, Coşkun,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop or anything. Just got to clean the place up a bit. But are you talking about Mr Glenny?”  


“Erm, no?” said Josh. “I don’t think so, anyway. We might be. Who’s Mr Glenny?”  


“Oh, sorry,” said Mrs Terling. “I hoped you’d heard something I hadn’t. Timothy Glenny, from the post office. He didn’t come round this morning, and nobody seems to know why. I called them, and they said that his wife was asking if he’d gone in early, but he never turned up, and it’s got the whole family a bit rattled.”  


“Maria,” whispered El, to herself.  


“Oh, you know the daughter?” said Mrs Terling. “She’s worried sick, I’ll bet. Idolises her father, that one.” With that, she ambled away, wiping the shelves with a duster.  


“Who’s Maria?” asked Josh.  


“You know,” said Will. “Erm, Maria. The, the short one. From Math.”  


Josh blinked at Will. “How’s that supposed to help? I’m not in your class.”  


“She’s my friend,” said El. She hadn’t noticed doing so, but she seemed to have risen to her feet. “We need to help her.”  


“How?” said Josh.  


And once upon a time, the answer to that question would have been very straightforward. She could have lifted a shelf and held it in midair, or folded the newspapers up without touching them. Or, even, done nothing, but known, deep within, that she would not be defenceless against whatever force was responsible for these disappearances.  


Once, before, she could feel the power inside her, locked away in a well-accessed cabinet in her mind. Once, that feeling would have given her confidence, almost a sense of invulnerability, a knowledge that she was capable.  


And now it was gone, and all that was left in that cabinet was an empty space, a hole where something special had been. And every time she thought about it, or dwelt on it, or tried to push her mind in just the right way, that hole got a little larger, and a little bit more of El Hopper fell into it.  


But that didn’t change the answer. That didn’t even change the situation that much. Her friend was in danger.  


“However we can,” she declared, and strode towards the doors.  


*******  


He tried to sleep, he tried to forget, but the memories would not budge. They just replayed, on an endless loop; their words, their faces, the sight of Joyce and El walking away from him. So Jim Hopper curled into a foetal position in the centre of his lair and cried, and then stopped.  


Amidst the despair, the soul-crushing loneliness and guilt, there was a single spark of light.  


Joyce – no, he couldn’t think of that as Joyce, couldn’t allow himself to make that mistake, because that way led to even more despair – had said one thing that didn’t ring true with the rest of it. If she had come to torment him and punish him, to call him out on all his mistakes, then she didn’t need to claim that there was a Gate nearby that she’d come through. All of his other questions had been diverted and deflected, so the fact that she’d answered that one – well, his policeman’s brain had not been used a great deal recently, but the inconsistency nagged at his mind.  


After all, there was no reason it couldn’t be true. He had searched for a Gate almost continually for the first few weeks, and somewhat more sporadically after that for a couple of months, but then he had given up, because it seemed easier that way, and it was entirely possible that a Gate could have opened in the time since. He vaguely remembered the Wheeler girl (Nancy, her name was Nancy, he remembered after a much longer time than seemed entirely reassuring) telling him, back in 1983, about a tree with a tiny Gate of its own inside it, something not made by either his daughter or by Russians with a gigantic motorcycle engine, so there was nothing to say that another one couldn’t have appeared.  


But, as he laid out the facts to himself, whispering them into the corners of the shadowed cabin, he knew that he was not admitting the main reason why he believed the thing that had pretended to be Joyce. And, with this realisation, continued self-deception seemed somewhat futile, so he added another thing to the list.  


She had not lied. Neither of them had lied. At any point, about anything.  


Yes, there were the obvious things – she’d known about Enzo’s, somehow, and had known that the two of them had come to save Will. Then there were the things which, now he came to think of it, were clearly lies of omission but not technically untruths – neither of the figures had actually outright stated that they were Joyce or El, simply that they’d come for him and that they were real (whatever that even meant any more).  


And then there were the other things they’d said. The accusations, the harsh and cutting words. _You clearly didn’t trust me at all. Joyce is kinder._  


_We’re better off without you._  


No, they hadn’t lied. Every word, every damned word, had been the truth.  


And that thought hurt more than all of the other ones before, but he pushed it down like he had pushed everything else down, compressed the pain and secured it somewhere deep inside him, put it in a box labelled NOW and stacked it with the ones from Vietnam and childhood and Sarah, as he rose to his feet and grabbed his axe and swung the door open. Because he did not have time for pain, not now. He had a Gate to find.  


Two hundred yards from his cabin, the Demogorgon got him.  


*******  


Dustin opened his eyes to an unfamiliar view, and the memories came flooding back. The forest, that was where they had been; walking through the forest in the hope that they would be able to escape from the people that had taken Mike and Max, fleeing from the creature, hiding up a tree from the creature, then – what? In the haziness of the early morning, it was hard to remember exactly what had happened, where they had gone next, but he was fairly sure that they were at least moderately safe by now. If not, then it would raise the question of exactly why he’d fallen asleep in the first place.  


“Oh, you’re awake,” came a slightly scratchy, sarcastic voice. “Took you long enough.”  


Dustin turned his head, and saw Murray Bauman sitting on a grey and weather-beaten sofa stacked with similarly weather-beaten books, which allowed his sleep-addled mind to finally put the remaining pieces of the puzzle into place.  


“Where are we?” he said.  


“In my RV,” said Murray, unhelpfully.  


“Yeah, I can see that,” said Dustin. “Where are we in the world?”  


Murray shrugged. “Nowhere fun. Small dirt track in the Appalachian Mountains. You want something to drink?”  


Dustin’s mouth was dry, he realised. He nodded, and swung himself upright, noticing as he did the absence of Lucas.  


“Your friend’s outside,” said Murray, noticing Dustin scanning around the interior of the RV. “Wanted a bathroom break, and objected to the one in here for some reason. Coffee or vodka?”  


“You know I’m fifteen, right?” said Dustin.  


Murray shrugged again. “Hey, I’m not a cop.”  


“Coffee,” said Dustin, ignoring the voice of temptation. “Five sugars, please.”  


Murray rolled his eyes, but began to prepare the drink. The door opened, and Lucas – who looked as though he hadn’t slept at all – entered, nodding at Dustin as he did.  


“Oh, good, you’re back,” said Murray, not turning to look at Lucas. “Now we can get going. Unless there’s any more of the local scenery you want to take in?”  


“I’m good,” said Lucas. “You alright, man?” This latter question was addressed to Dustin.  


“Yeah,” said Dustin, taking a sip of the coffee and immediately burning his mouth. “You look awful.”  


“Wow, thanks,” said Lucas. “Unlike some people, I don’t just pass out the minute that the danger’s past.”  


“Yeah, and look who’s more awake now,” retorted Dustin. “Think I chose better than you.”  


“I was actually worried, you know, about our friends,” said Lucas. “So unless you fall asleep whenever you’re worried –“  


“Children, please,” said Murray, rubbing his temples. “I’ll take you both to the soft play area in town if you just shut up.”  


“We’re going to town?” said Dustin, and then, “Which town?”  


“First one that has a phone,” said Lucas. “Unless this bald piece of shit refuses yet again. We’ve been past five, maybe ten towns this morning, and he wouldn’t pull over in any of them for me to call home.”  


“I told you,” said Murray, “that those towns clearly weren’t safe. So I’m sorry if your mommy and daddy are worrying their little heads off about you, but I’m fairly sure that they’d enjoy it less if you were captured and interrogated by the army.”  


“Our friends –“  


“You can’t help your friends now. If they were taken to Ansted, then they’re not leaving unless Beeching lets them out.”  


“Who’s Beeching?” asked Dustin.  


Murray rolled his eyes. “Oh, great, I have to go through the whole spiel again. Your friends were grabbed by soldiers and taken to a base near the town of Ansted.”  


“The one that we saw from the top of the hill,” added Lucas, then fell silent again as Murray turned to glare at him.  


“Ansted doesn’t exist, officially,” Murray continued. “But in the showy, flashy way, not the actual secret way. More like Hawkins Lab than the Soviet base under the mall. A few months ago, a guy called Jack Beeching was appointed as director of the place; this coincided with some major shake-up in the shady bits of the government – wait, no, that’s not specific enough, that just applies to the whole rotten edifice. He’s been conducting some weird experiments, possibly similar to the ones they were doing back in Hawkins before we pushed them out, and that’s presumably where that creature came from. Happy?”  


“And you were tracking it? Trying to get more information on the Upside-Down that way?”  


Murray shook his head irritably. “No. God, no, kid, don’t you think I’ve got better things to do with my time here? I was trying to find out more information about the base, since they’re doing sketchy shit there. You just got lucky that I was in the neighbourhood. Don’t go thinking that this is some kind of rescue mission.”  


“No,” said Lucas. “Spying, more like.”  


Murray smiled crookedly. “Of course I’m spying on the government. They do it to us, after all. Any good citizen should return the favour.”  


“Bullshit,” said Lucas. “You’re not doing it for yourself. You’re spying for the Russians.”  


Without much warning, the half-full cup slipped from Dustin’s fingers, spilling hot coffee across the floor of the RV. “Wait, what? Lucas, what do you mean?”  


“I mean just that,” said Lucas, standing now. “He’s a Russian spy.”  


Murray tilted his head to one side, and turned to look at Lucas. “Interesting accusation, Sinclair. Care to explain your reasoning?”  


“Yeah, I will,” said Lucas. “Point number one: you speak Russian. We all found that out back in July.”  


“My sainted mother speaks French,” said Murray. “Is she spying for President Miterrand, while we’re at it?”  


“Point number two,” continued Lucas, ignoring Murray, “you were literally just spying on an army base in the dead of night. Point number three: the radio equipment in here could easily reach Moscow. It’s that stuff Mr Clarke was telling us about back in November, Dustin, the fancy stuff with the encryption and shit.”  


Murray began to slowly clap. “Very well done, kid. You’ve found me guilty of unlawfully possessing a radio. Anything at all concrete, or just the general suspicion shared by most of this country that anybody who doesn’t like the government must be in bed with the Russkies?”  


“Yeah, actually,” said Lucas. “Point number four. All the communist literature you’ve got here in the RV.”  


Murray, slowly, leaned back. “Tell me more.”  


“I haven’t exactly read any of this,” admitted Lucas. “But I know the names. Marx and Engels, Plekhanov, Gramsci, Lenin. These are Marxist philosophers. Marxism, Dustin. The Soviet ideology.”  


Murray smiled, this time seeming genuinely pleased. “Not bad, kid. Good name recognition.”  


“Wait, so it’s true?” said Dustin. “You’re actually a Russian spy?”  


“No,” said Murray, grinning. “But I am a Marxist. You got that one right, Sinclair.”  


“So –“  


“Regardless of what your idiot sister says,” Murray continued, turning to face Lucas, “which she did not hesitate to go on about for three hours whilst we were waiting at the hospital in July, Marxism is not just ‘the Soviet ideology’. It is significantly more complicated than that, as you’d be able to find out from reading some of these books.”  


“And the radio equipment?”  


Murray snorted. “Please. I’m a conspiracy theorist and warrior of truth. You think we all just talk to each other on the telephone? I’ve got a contact, out in DC – spooky guy, kind of intense – who swears by this sort of stuff.”  


Lucas, looking slightly defeated, sat back down again. “So you’re not working for Moscow?”  


“Not any more,” said Murray. “Not since ’79, and Afghanistan. Sure, before that, I did a bit of work for them, on the side, but then it turned out that they were just as imperialist as the good old US of A.”  


Lucas nodded, slowly, as though he were thinking. “Fair enough.”  


“Great,” said Murray. “Now that my name’s been cleared by the High Court of Two Teenagers, can I get driving?”  


“Where are we going?” said Dustin.  


“I’ve got what I came for,” said Murray, casting a sideways glance out of the window in the direction of Ansted. “I think it’s time to go back to Indiana. Back to Hawkins.”  


*******  


Joyce Byers stared out of the windows of the new house, and thought about prisons.  


It wasn’t even a particularly new house, by this point. They’d been there for four months now, even if it sometimes seemed like she’d maybe only spent a week in the house at the maximum, what with work and everything. Shifts at the store were supposed to be only ten hours, but in recent weeks, around Christmas, that number had slowly and unofficially crept upwards and upwards, and there was nothing she could really do about that short of quitting, and they needed the money anyway, so that was that.  


And it was a trade-off, like everything else was. You get more money, but you don’t get to spend time with your family. You get to keep your job, but you can’t always be there to keep your family safe. You get a new house, partially paid for by a winking Dr Owens, but you have to tear everyone else apart. You get a daughter, but lose someone else. You get to fall in love again, heal from that jagged wound that Bob’s death had left behind, but then you have to watch them die as well, kill them yourself, be the one to turn the key and turn them into ashes.  


And then you had to live with those trades, because, after all, you were the one who made them in the first place, and you can’t undo them now. But the problem with that was that the trades became a prison, something that constrained and trapped you, and you couldn’t get away from them.  


She had spent her whole life thinking about prisons, really. In the literal sense, her father had languished in one for a significant portion of her childhood, between the ages of five and ten, and then again from thirteen to fifteen. When he wasn’t in a prison himself, he was making the family home into one for her and her mother, telling them not to go out, not to leave the house because of the dangerous people out there. So, naturally, she married one of those dangerous people when she could, and to nobody’s surprise (not even entirely her own) Lonnie became a prison as well, not restricting and constraining in any physical sense, but certainly providing enough emotional and mental walls and barriers for any one marriage, until enough became enough and she broke free yet again.  


And now here she was. Inactive, despite everything, despite the bus crash in the mountains, despite the conspiracy theories that Murray kept peddling her about Starcourt, despite the fundamental lack of any sort of satisfactory final resolution to everything. In a house paid for with weregild money, in a job that needed to feed three teenagers, in a life filled with unbroken promises and irrevocable conditions and unshakeable situations. In a prison.  


There was a knock at the door.  


She stood, and peered out of the window. An unfamiliar figure stood outside it, a short, stocky man wearing denim and a flat cap. He raised his hand, and knocked again.  


Joyce picked up the first thing she saw that could be used as a weapon – Will’s walkie-talkie, which she had used to speak to Steve and Robin a few hours previously – concealed it under her cardigan, and opened the door a crack. “Hello?”  


“Hello,” said the man, in a strange tone of voice, almost out of breath. “Are you Joyce Byers?”  


Joyce narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”  


“My name’s John,” said the man. “John Whitworth. Are your children here?”  


Something in Joyce’s head began to scream warnings, and – based on past experience – she listened to it, and said, “Why do you want to know about my children?”  


The man tilted his head to one side, paused for a couple of seconds, and then said, “I’m from the school. I need to talk to them about their work.”  


“Are you one of their teachers?” said Joyce, gripping the walkie-talkie and readying herself to brace the door if he tried to force his way in.  


Again, the man paused for a moment before answering. “Yes. I am Mr Whitworth. I teach them mathematics.”  


“They’ve never mentioned that name to me before,” said Joyce, although she had no idea if this was true or not; for all she knew, Will and El were taught by a talking goat. “The Math teacher is called Mr Davies. Who the hell are you?”  


The man tilted his head again, and looked up at a spot a couple of feet above her head, and then said, “I am Mr Whitworth. I teach them mathematics. I need to talk to them about their work.”  


Joyce froze for a moment, and then said, “If you’ll just wait there for a minute, I’ll go and get them.”  


She closed the door, and took a deep breath, trying to steady herself. Then, as calmly as she could in the present circumstances, she made her way through to her bedroom and retrieved the gun from her bedside dresser.  


There was a crash from the door, and she ran back through, biting her lip, trying to stay calm and focused. The door was still standing, but barely, and as she watched, there was another crash, and the man ploughed through as the hinges buckled and snapped.  


“Where are the children?” he said, his tone of voice unchanged. “I need to talk to them about their work.”  


“Get out,” said Joyce, levelling the gun at him. “I mean it. I will not hesitate to shoot you if you don’t get out of this house right now.”  


“I need to talk to the children,” said the man, as though he had not even noticed the gun. “Where are they?”  


“I don’t know what you want with my children,” said Joyce, “but you’re not having them. Now get out of here, or I will shoot you and then call the police, and Hopper will –”  


She stopped, and took a deep breath, but her hand was shaking now. The man seemed to notice, and stepped forwards, quite deliberately.  


“You will not hurt me,” he said. “You will take me to the children.”  


“Or what?”  


“Or you will break,” said the man, his voice still hypnotically flat.  


Joyce willed her hands to stop shaking, and looked at the man slowly stepping towards her across the floor of the hallway. His stance was odd, like someone walking for the first time after watching other people doing it but failing to entirely grasp the details, and his arms hung loosely at his sides, the fingers extended and palms outwards. In his eyes, there was something uncertain, almost uncomprehending, as though he was genuinely not sure why he was advancing on her or demanding to see Will and El.  


But none of this was particularly important, not in the face of the dark and flowing shapes that moved like shoals of fish beneath his skin, because that was enough to tell her exactly what sort of situation she was dealing with.  


“We need the children,” said the man, stretching out his arm towards her. “We need their memories.”  


“Well,” said Joyce, “you can’t have them. They’re mine.”  


She fired the gun.  


*******  


“How did you do that?” asked Nikolay, his head spinning even as his gun arm remained steady and stable. “You – you changed – are you a shapeshifter?”  


The woman sitting on the bed – Kali, she had called herself – shook her head, but did not elaborate, as she wiped the blood from her nose. Her eyes were bloodshot as well, and her hands were trembling slightly; she looked as though she had not slept in several days, which for all Nikolay knew was true.  


“Come on,” said Nikolay. “You said you’d tell me everything. Get started.”  


Kali leaned back against the wall with a sigh, and said, “Stop pointing that gun at me, and I will.”  


“Erm, no thanks,” said Nikolay. “For all I know, you can kill me with your brain or something like that. Give me a bit of reassurance here.”  


“I probably could,” said Kali, her eyes dark, “if I had a bit more energy. You’re lucky that I’m burnt out for now, otherwise I’m sure that I could find something for you to shoot, and get a nice ricochet on that. Or just steal your gun and use that myself. That would work as well.”  


“OK,” said Nikolay, uneasily. “Discussing how you’d murder the questioner. Novel interrogation tactic, I must say.”  


“Oh, this is an interrogation?” said Kali, almost supercilious.  


“Of course it is,” said Nikolay. “Whoever you are, you aren’t supposed to be here. You’ve infiltrated one of the most secret and secure facilities in the entire Soviet Union, and either impersonated or killed, or both, Ivan Ivanovich Vosemov, in order to do this. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t take you to Stepanov immediately.”  


“Because you haven’t yet,” said Kali. “You’re too curious. You want to find out how I did the Vosemov thing, and you think that Stepanov will just throw me to the creature without asking.”  


Nikolay paused for a moment, and then said, “True. But not the whole reason. I don’t need to hurry here. You don’t pose a threat to me.”  


“What on earth makes you think that?”  


“You haven’t attacked me yet,” said Nikolay, smiling ironically. “You don’t have the energy to use your magic, and you’re a foot shorter than me. I’m trained for combat and self-defence, and you don’t have any chance of getting the element of surprise. Now, will you please tell me what’s going on? Why are you here in Klyuchi?”  


“It’s rather simple, really,” said Kali. She sounded almost bored. “I’m here to execute Martin Brenner.”  


*******  


The central square of the town of Ansted was quiet, almost deserted, like a scene from one of those Old West movies. Steve crossed his fingers, and hoped against hope that the situation would not end in a gunfight.  


“Rob,” he said. “We’re here.”  


Robin jumped slightly at the sound of his voice, startled out of her reverie, and looked up from the sheets of paper she had spent most of the journey working on. The paper had been liberated from the Sinclairs’ study, in the hope that this would in some way make it look more official, and had subsequently been crumpled and torn quite strategically by Erica, who had proclaimed herself an expert in forgery (Steve had tried not to think too hard about this). Then, after three hours of silent driving, punctuated occasionally by Robin muttering things about grammar and cursive under her breath, they had stopped at a gas station, where the pair of them had painstakingly drawn up their forged Russian documents.  


The results were not pretty, although this was sort of the point. Acting on Robin’s logic that ‘we can’t be too specific about anything, because then they might figure out that we don’t have a clue what we’re talking about’, two of the scraps of paper had been covered in random numbers and the odd Russian word. The other piece – a larger sheet – was the source of much debate between the two of them for a while, before it was finally agreed that Steve could think of short ominous sentences for her to translate, which would hopefully be mistaken for code.  


Steve was not confident of success.  


“So, where do we go now?” he said. “Like, is there an official place for this?”  


“What, where all the prisoner exchanges take place?” said Robin. “Do you know where we are, Harrington? Do you think that this is Berlin? Looking for Checkpoint Charlie?”  


“Shut up, Buckley,” said Steve, poking her in the side of the face. “I mean, did the guy say where we needed to meet them, on the phone?”  


“Just in front of the post office,” said Robin. “Which is here. I guess they’re late.”  


“Really fills you with confidence in our military,” remarked Steve.  


Unexpectedly, this drew a snort of laughter from Robin. “Maybe that’s why we lost in Vietnam. Couldn’t turn up on time.”  


“We lost in Vietnam?”  


“Ha ha,” said Robin, and then turned to look at him, slightly concerned. “Wait, was that a genuine question? Did you actually think we won?”  


“Erm,” said Steve, who absolutely had believed this to be the case. “No. Obviously not. Just thought it was a bit more complicated than that.”  


“They kicked our asses there,” said Robin. “My dad –“  


But Steve did not find out what had happened to Robin’s father, because – without much fanfare – a military truck rolled calmly round the corner, and came to a halt in the centre of the square. Three men stepped out of the front, and began to walk towards the car.  


“Ready?” asked Steve.  


“Fucking no,” said Robin. “But let’s do this.”  


They stepped out of the car. It was colder than it looked.  


“Miss Buckley! Mr Harrington!” said one of the men, striding towards them and waving genially. “Jack Beeching. We spoke on the phone just earlier.”  


“Hi,” said Steve. “How’s it going?”  


Robin elbowed him.  


“Do you have the children?” she asked.  


“They’re perfectly safe, don’t worry,” said Beeching. “I promise you that I am not the sort of guy that hurts children. Do you have the documents?”  


“In my pocket,” said Steve, patting his chest. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”  


Beeching let out a startled chuckle, but waved to his men, who opened the back of the truck. There, surrounded by another eight soldiers, sat Mike and Max, neither of whom looked entirely comfortable.  


Steve looked at Robin, who gave a nod. Slowly, unthreateningly, he reached into his jacket pocket, and withdrew the folded pieces of paper, lifting them into the air and waving them around.  


There was a brief silence, as if both sides were waiting for the other to say something. Steve was the first to oblige.  


“So, erm, how does this work?” he asked. “Like, do we swap these in the middle, or something?”  


“You are the worst hostage negotiator in recorded history,” whispered Robin, before raising her voice. “What he means is, you need to send the children out now. Send them over to us.”  


Beeching nodded to his men, and Mike and Max were lifted bodily from the back of the truck, due to the ropes around their arms and legs. These were untied, and the pair of them were ushered forwards to the centre of the square; Steve and Robin, slowly, cautiously, mirrored their movements, and Steve passed the papers to Robin in the hopes that this would conceal the fact that his hands were shaking slightly.  


“Now, don’t get me wrong here,” said Beeching. “We’re very glad that you’re returning these documents to our safekeeping. But that’s not all we need. We could do with asking you both a few questions as well.”  


“Oh, you absolute –“ began Max, before the soldier escorting her put his hand on her shoulder in a warning gesture, and she fell silent.  


Steve and Robin glanced at each other, nervous, uncertain, before Robin spoke, as Steve began to back away to the car.  


“That wasn’t our deal,” she said to Beeching. “You said that you’d set the children free if you got the documents.”  


“Miss Buckley,” said Beeching, “we’re not taking you prisoner here. We just need to ask a few questions, and then you’ll be free to go as well.”  


Steve took another step backwards.  


“Bullshit,” said Robin. “You just wanted to lure us in. Get hold of us too. We’re not going anywhere with you.”  


“We really would appreciate it if you came with us peacefully,” said Beeching, still smiling. “We would greatly regret having to use non-lethal force.”  


“Well, that’s not going to happen,” said Robin, and, behind her back, clenched her left hand into a fist.  


That was the signal. Steve spun on his heel and sprinted the final three steps, and, as the soldiers ostentatiously cocked their guns and began to move, delivered an almighty kick to the front of the car.  


It was not a particularly well-maintained car. The air conditioning was temperamental at the best of times, and sometimes cut out with no warning whatsoever. The brakes were worn, and took a while to kick in. The wing mirrors were misaligned.  


The car alarm was extremely sensitive.  


A wailing noise, punctuated by blasts of the horn, filled the square, and Robin yelled over it.  


“How’s this going to look?” she shouted. “You guys, dragging away two unarmed teenagers?”  


“To whom?” shouted back Beeching.  


“People will come and see what’s going on here,” Robin replied, her voice certain. “They’ll hear the noise and come running.”  


Beeching smiled again. “No, Miss Buckley. They won’t.”  


And, as Steve looked around, he realised that Beeching was right. Nobody was coming. Nobody was looking out of windows, or peering round the corners. The people of Ansted did not want to see any of this.  


“Just give us the documents, and come with us,” said Beeching. “Step away from the car, Mr Harrington. And, for heaven’s sake, please stop acting like we’re the bad guys here, when we’re just trying to stop the Russians from invading again.”  


Steve, feeling numb in the face of the soldiers, returned to the centre of the square. The alarm, its cycle complete, fell silent.  


“Why do you want these documents so bad?” asked Mike, from behind Beeching. “You don’t know what’s in them.”  


“Everything counts, Mr Wheeler,” said Beeching, smiling a patronising smile. “For all we know, this could be the difference between victory and defeat in these documents.”  


And an idea came to Steve. He grabbed the papers from Robin’s hand.  


“Give us the kids,” he said, trying to make his voice sound as menacing and deep as possible, “or I’ll destroy them. The documents. Not the kids.”  


Beeching’s face froze, and Steve could almost see the calculations behind it.  


“How?” he asked.  


“I’ll…I’ll…”  


“He’ll eat them,” said Robin. “You won’t be able to reconstruct them when all of the ink’s dissolved in Harrington’s weird saliva.”  


Steve nodded emphatically, and raised the papers to his mouth.  


“Let the kids go now,” Robin continued, “and they’ll get into the car, and then we will too, and then we’ll throw the documents out of the window for you as we drive off.”  


“And if you want to ask us any more questions,” added Steve, “you can just phone us.”  


Beeching was motionless, considering, for a good ten seconds, and Steve could feel the sweat running down his back despite the cold mountain air. Finally, he nodded.  


“You get in the car,” he said, “then put the papers on the floor, then you can start the engine and leave. But please don’t think that this is over.”  


Steve bit his lip to keep himself from saying anything, making any comments that could endanger the situation, as the soldiers released Mike and Max. The two of them glanced at each other uncertainly, and walked across to Steve and Robin, and then to the car.  


Steve and Robin followed, backing away, not daring to turn their heads, as Steve continued to hold the papers next to his mouth. Awkwardly, behind his back, Steve fumbled until he found the door handle, and opened the door, lowering himself down to the seat. Then, gently, carefully, he placed the forged Russian documents onto the concrete beneath.  


Throughout all of this, Beeching had not moved, as still as a lizard. Then, sharply, precisely, he shook his head ever so slightly to the soldiers behind him, who relaxed into a fractionally less threatening posture.  


“Drive, Steve, drive,” said Max behind him, so he did, flooring the accelerator, speeding out of that town square, listening to the sounds of Mike hyperventilating in the back seat and considering joining him in this. But there was no response, no attack, no last-minute betrayal. The soldiers simply stood there, and watched them leave.  


It was a good few miles before anyone dared to say something.  


“Are we safe now?” asked Max. “Can we breathe?”  


“We’re OK,” said Robin. “They’re not following us. You can both relax.”  


“No,” said Steve, quietly.  


He did not entirely realise he had done so, until he looked up, seeing Robin staring at him with a blend of fear and questioning.  


“No?” she asked.  


“Too easy,” said Steve. “That was all far too easy. The guy was right. It’s not over yet.”  


*******  


The creature put up a good fight, he gave it that. Not quite as good as the first one – that one had taken fire and bullets and Harrington’s goddamned baseball bat and had kept fighting – but this creature, the monster, the Demogorgon if he was really letting the kids dictate what things were called now, didn’t die even after the first few times he struck its neck with a sharpened axe, nor the next ten. All in all, Hopper guessed, it took probably twenty blows, maybe twenty-five, until it was lying dead on the slime-covered forest floor, and even then, he felt it was only prudent to keep hacking away until its fleshy, tooth-filled head was no longer physically attached to the rest of his body.  


It was around this point that he realised that he was bleeding, and, furthermore, that he could not really feel his right arm any more.  


The axe fell to the floor with this realisation, and so did he, slumping to his knees.  


He stared at his arm. A rare steak stared back at him, blood dripping from the mangled yet strangely numb flesh onto the forest floor, puddling and pooling among the black parodies of leaves. And then, like a wide and slow river, the pain began to flow in.  


The adrenaline of the fight – the first real excitement he had experienced for weeks, somehow – had clearly held it at bay, allowing him to shrug off the creature’s ambush and start trading blows with it, but that was gone now, that had worn off, or possibly had dripped out onto the floor with the other two pints of blood. There were other wounds too, ones he was just beginning to feel, covering his chest and his back; the creature’s claws had torn gashes into him, and some of its barbed teeth seemed to have snapped off inside him. And now things were descending, wasps or flies or something, seemingly carved from some kind of slowly quivering obsidian, to lap at the blood on the floor and the blood on his clothes and the blood in his open veins, and he closed his eyes as the pain washed over him, again and again, again and again.  


And a sound split the forest, a slow, eerie whistling. A tune that sounded half-familiar, mocking.  


_Should I stay…_ thought Jim Hopper, half a question, a moment before passing out.  


He opened his eyes, and Billy Hargrove was standing over him.  


“Not looking so good there, now, are we, chief?” said the boy, his voice slow and relaxed. “Seen better days, haven’t we?”  


He was still on the forest floor, the cabin half-visible through the swirling ashy mists, and the shining insects were dancing around him, a swirling, ever-changing shape. And, behind their swarm, leaning against a tree, was the Hargrove kid, all denim and leather and smiles.  


“What…” began Hopper, but his mouth was dry, deathly dry, and he coughed rather than finishing his question. It didn’t matter, really. He hadn’t known quite what he was going to ask.  


“What am I doing here?” asked Hargrove, grinning like a skull. “Not too much, really. Not exactly a lot to do round these parts. All the cinemas and bars are closed.”  


Hopper closed his eyes, and forced himself to open them again. He couldn’t be passing out again; he had to hold on to consciousness.  


“Fuck, I’ve been bored,” continued Hargrove. “So, so, fucking bored, ever since you killed me.”  


Hopper swallowed something – maybe blood – from the back of his throat, and forced out the words, “I didn’t kill you, Hargrove.”  


The kid laughed, laughed as if he were genuinely amused. “You totally did, though. You think I’d be dead if we had a different guy handling the situation?”  


Hopper furrowed his eyebrows in a silent question.  


“Any other chief of police might have noticed a whole fucking Russian fortress being built in his town,” said Hargrove, a malicious sparkling in his eyes. “And any half-trained cop would have dealt with the giant flesh monster before it got round to killing quarter of the population.” And he leaned forwards then, stared Hopper directly in the eyes, and the smile fell from his face. “Fuck, any decent human being might have done something about Neil Hargrove beating up his son every night.”  


Hopper closed his eyes again, and did not force them open this time.  


“But hey, that’s how it goes,” said Hargrove. “You live and you learn. In that order.”  


“That’s how it went for us,” came a second voice, a young woman, and Hopper cracked one eye open to see Barbara Holland, perched on the end of a decaying log. “After you killed us, we had a lot of time to think about where things went wrong.”  


Hopper forced himself up onto one elbow, and stared at her. “I didn’t fucking kill you. Either of you. Any of you, if you want to wheel any more fucking waxworks out. I didn’t kill you.”  


“You let us die,” said Barb.  


“Not the same thing,” Hopper growled.  


“It is when you’re the chief of police,” said Hargrove, smiling down at him. “Or didn’t you read the fine print when you took the job?”  


“He didn’t,” said someone else, someone on the other side of him. His face was in shadow, silhouetted against the dim glow of the leaden skies, but Hopper remembered all too well what Mike Wheeler’s voice sounded like. “He just thought it meant that he could do whatever he wanted.”  


“OK, you’re not even dead, so –“ Hopper began, but was cut off by Barb.  


“Throwing his power around? Telling people what to do? Like a playground bully?”  


“No,” insisted Hopper, and, somewhere, felt a stabbing pain blossom within his ribs.  


“Yes,” said Wheeler. “You threatened me, told me to stay away from El, told me to lie to her. Maybe you’d have killed me, made it look like an accident.”  


“I obviously wouldn’t have,” said Hopper, sharply, feeling faintly breathless. “The law – I served the law – I wasn’t –“  


“But, Chief?” said a fourth voice, and Will Byers was standing in front of him. “You didn’t. Serve the law, that is. You cut a deal with the bad men, and turned a blind eye when they broke the law in front of your nose.”  


“What?” said Hopper.  


“You traded me for her,” said Will, his tone so polite, so helpful. “You gave El to Brenner. You sold your daughter to the devil. You remember?”  


“But she wasn’t your daughter then, of course,” added Wheeler. “She was just a random kid, and, hey, they’re ten to the dollar. You were going to let her go back to Brenner, because it wasn’t your problem.”  


“ _I_ wasn’t your problem,” said Hargrove. “I was one of the bad guys, just there to make trouble. I wasn’t worthy of being rescued. And so I never was.”  


“You failed us,” said Barb, so quietly.  


Hopper said nothing, and thought around twenty different thoughts at once, a patchwork of denial and justification and caveats and reinterpretations and counterarguments and flat, hopeless, despair. And yet, beneath that, there was one thought that had not yet given up. _We just need to find the Gate. That’s our only chance now. Let them talk. Conserve energy, just enough for one sprint. Find the Gate, make it through, live._  


“Well,” said Hargrove, “I guess we’d better give you a lift, then. Doesn’t look like you’re going to be walking anywhere for the rest of this week.”  


And, with that, he stepped towards Hopper, and took hold of his left shoulder, the unmangled one, with cold and solid hands. The others followed; a rueful-faced Barb on his right shoulder, and Wheeler, looking bitter and hardened, on his right leg, and Will, his face still so kindly and understanding, on his left leg; and they lifted him into the air. And then they began to walk, the stretcher-bearers, through the forest, through the falling ash, through the endless night of the Upside-Down.  


“Where are you taking me?” rasped Hopper.  


Will turned to look over his shoulder. “Do you remember, two years ago, how you used to come with me to the Lab? Sit with me during the tests? Be there for me?”  


Hopper nodded, as much as he could.  


“Well, we’re doing the same for you now,” said Wheeler. “You might want company where we’re going.”  


“We’re going to the Lab,” said Barb. “We’re going home.”  


*******  


“Execute Brenner?” said Nikolay. “Why? On whose behalf?”  


“On my behalf,” said Kali, her eyes flashing angrily. “And my siblings, and my friends, and everyone else he tortured and destroyed.”  


“Ah,” said Nikolay, understanding dawning on him. “The children he experimented on, in America. You’re one of them, aren’t you?”  


Wordlessly, Kali rolled up her sleeve, revealing a simple tattoo of the number _008_.  


“I see,” said Nikolay, his voice gentler now. “ _Vosem’._ Eight. Makes sense. How many of you were there?”  


Kali shrugged. “I don’t entirely know. At least twelve, at one point, but most of us didn’t survive his little experiments – the drugs, the tests, the exertion. Two had his brain fried with electric shocks; Five got some kind of disease. Ten was killed when they were seeing how much pain she could ignore.”  


Nikolay tried to push down the wave of sympathy rising within him. “But you escaped?”  


“Just,” said Kali, bitterly. “But the people who took me in didn’t, not in the end. Nor did most of my brothers and sisters. Eventually, I found somewhere to hide, found some people to hide with. And then we started fighting back.”  


“You attacked the lab?”  


“No, fuck, no. That place was a fortress, which would have been reason enough even if I’d wanted to ever go back there. But the people who worked there – well, they had to come out eventually, and when they did, there was no question of punishment or accountability. So we tracked them down, and balanced the books.”  


“Vigilante justice,” Nikolay mused. “You, and your friends, hunting down Brenner’s employees across the country. And then you decided to go for him?”  


“We thought he was dead,” said Kali. “There was an incident at the Lab, and there was an obituary, so pretty and sanitised, talking about his passion for psychology and his devotion to his job. But one of his men gave him away, told us that he was still alive to spare his own life from my sister. That was when the real hunt began.”  


Her mouth had been twisted into a bitter expression, halfway between grimace and smile, for some time now, and that only deepened as she continued.  


“We hunted for months. Searched everywhere, tracked down all of his old associates. None of them would talk, no matter how hard we tried, and most of them had disappeared anyway, written out of the records and hidden by their masters in Washington or wherever Brenner’s fucking shadow empire was run from.”  


She shifted uncomfortably.  


“Jane had already gone; she left the night that we found Carroll and got the information from him. Said she had to help her friends. Mick and Dottie were the next to leave; they got tired of the hunt, wanted to settle down somewhere and stop chasing people, wanted to live. They got an apartment in San Francisco in April together, and told me that I could move in as well if I ever wanted. I told them that they were traitors, and that I never wanted to see them again.”  


She rubbed her eyes, tiredness written all across her face.  


“Axel was next. We fell out in New Orleans, back in June. We called each other a lot of things. He said that I was mad, that I was just murdering people without rhyme or reason. I made him see spiders for a whole hour, made him feel them crawling over him and into him, and the next morning, he was gone. And then it was just me and Funshine, and he told me that he would always be there if I needed him, but that I needed to know that I was destroying myself. And, eventually, he was gone too, because I pushed him away, told him that I’d do the whole thing alone.”  


Nikolay, slowly, nodded. “I see. So how did you find Brenner in the end?”  


Kali shrugged. “I got lucky, eventually. Found someone who’d been involved in the coverup for his death, traced the leads back. He’d managed to escape to Russia, so I knew where I had to go.”  


“Yes,” said Nikolay. “Russia is a famously small country, with everything in the same place.”  


Kali rolled her eyes, but there was a hint of pride in her voice. “I traced him here, eventually. Worked out who he’d made contact with, and who they put him in touch with, and it all led back to Stepanov and Kamchatka. It took a few months of research – I’d never even been in a library before August – but I worked it all out. Not only how to get here, but how to disguise myself so I could get close enough.”  


“I think I see,” said Nikolay. “You used your illusion powers – that’s your thing, right? – to make yourself look like Vosemov, and kept it up every time there was somebody watching. And you couldn’t disguise your voice, because you can only do sight, so you didn’t say anything.”  


Kali tilted her head. “Not quite. I can manage audio sometimes as well – it’s a lot of effort, but it’s possible – and I’ve managed hypnosis of a kind on a few occasions. But they drain my energy, which isn’t what you want when you’re having to sustain a complicated illusion for an entire day. Also, it turns out, Russian is a really difficult language. None of you pronounce anything the way that you’re supposed to in the textbooks.”  


“It’s the Muscovites,” nodded Nikolay. “We’re a lot more refined in Ukraine. So, you hid yourself inside an illusion of a big silent soldier, and managed to get yourself sent here to Klyuchi.”  


“I made the American soldiers think that there was one extra name on the list for the spy swap,” said Kali, “and the rest was easy. I mean, I couldn’t talk to anyone, or really understand everything that was going on, and I needed to avoid physical contact so that nobody noticed that Vosemov was a lot emptier than he looked, but I made it here in the end. And now it’s almost time.”  


“To kill Brenner,” said Nikolay. It was not a question. Absently, he noticed that somewhere along the line, he had stopped pointing the gun at her.  


“I’d have done it before now if I thought I could get away with it,” said Kali, smiling crookedly. “But illusions fail when you’re feeling strong emotions, sometimes, and killing the man that made me call him father, killing my jailer and torturer…”  


She trailed off.  


A couple of seconds later, an alarm began to sound.  


*******  


It was dark by the time they made it back to Hawkins, and the car had been silent for a couple of hours as Steve silently drove the lot of them through the grey clouds of the early evening. Max had slept at some point, she was fairly sure, but didn’t entirely know when; her mind had been occupying that strange region between thoughtfulness and dormancy, lost in flights of fancy and trains of thought about what was going to happen next, when they would be called to account for the lies they had sold to Beeching and his men. Maybe not today, probably not tomorrow, but one day.  


She was jolted from her sleep by the feeling of the car pulling to a halt.  


“What’s going on?” she said, her throat dry. “Are we back?”  


Robin turned to face her. “Nearly. Outskirts of Hawkins. But there’s a police roadblock.”  


This simple sentence pulled Max back into consciousness with a terrifying abruptness, and she nudged the sleeping form of Mike in the ribs. “Wheeler. Wake up. Something’s happening.”  


Mike forced his eyes open, only to sit up in alarm at the sight of blue flashing lights on the road ahead.  


“What is it?” he asked, but received no answer, for at that moment, a hand knocked on the window.  


Steve glanced nervously around the car, and then – after the knock came again – wound down the window. He peered out into the darkness, then let out a sigh of relief.  


“Oh, hey, Callahan,” he said. “Nice night for it. What’s with the roadblock?”  


“A bit of respect would be nice, Harrington,” said Callahan. “But you can go through, you’re not what we’re looking for here. Why are there a couple of kids in the back seat?”  


“Picking them up from a camp,” said Robin, quickly. “Is there a problem?”  


“What, up there?” said Callahan, nodding his head towards the roadblock. “Too early to tell. New Chief thinks that there is, but he’s a bit paranoid.”  


“The new Chief?”  


Callahan nodded. “Jim’s replacement. Some guy from the big city. David Waxham. He’s been jumping at shadows for the past few weeks, but I guess I can’t blame him, what with…” He tailed off.  


Steve looked expectantly at him, and then, when this failed to work, said, “What with what?”  


“You know,” said Callahan. “The summer. Starcourt. All the deaths. Hawkins is a weird place these days.”  


“Yeah, but has something actually happened?”  


“Tonight? Gunfire on West Martin, apparently, but nobody saw anything. Waxham seems to have got the idea into his head that this is somehow connected to all sorts of other things – suspicious behaviour from random people, you know, or some break-in at the old Lab last week. But then, he’s the sort of guy that gets his news off late-night talk shows. More conspiracies than a CIA meeting.” Callahan chuckled to himself. “Anyway, you can go through.”  


As the car began to move again, Max met Robin’s eyes. “This isn’t good.”  


“You think this is connected to your bus crash?”  


Max shrugged, but Robin nodded in agreement.  


“It’s happening again,” said Steve, darkly, and the car drove on in silence for a few minutes.  


As they pulled up outside Mike’s house, Max noticed that Karen Wheeler was sitting on a garden chair on the front lawn.  


Mike had noticed as well, and muttered something under his breath in a tone of equal trepidation and frustration. He jumped out of the car almost before it had come to a halt, and rushed over to his mother on the lawn. Max, acting on an instinct born of nosiness, rolled her window down slightly, ignoring Steve’s disapproving glance.  


“Mom,” said Mike, “I’m so sorry that I’m late back – the bus crashed, and we all had to sign a whole bunch of paperwork in West Virginia, and then they wouldn’t give us replacement tickets, and –“  


Karen looked at her son blankly. “What are you talking about?”  


“You…you weren’t waiting for me?”  


Karen blinked owlishly, and took a long pause before replying. Max noticed an empty bottle of wine lying beneath the chair, tucked only slightly out of sight.  


“Michael, honey,” she said, “it’s fine. Go inside. We’ll talk about this in the morning, if you want.”  


“Are you alright, mom?” said Mike, in a voice that Max wasn’t sure she had ever heard him use before.  


“Oh, yes,” said Karen, smiling a brittle smile. “Absolutely fine, Michael. Everything’s absolutely wonderful.”  


A pause hung in the air.  


“So…” began Mike, but Max never found out how he had been planning to finish this sentence.  


“Your father walked out this morning,” said Karen, and the smile stretched wider and thinner, until it was little more than a pained, uncontrolled, grimace. “I don’t know when – if – he’ll be back. He’s left us, Michael. He’s gone.”  


*******  


The doorway to Longbow House was dark and shadowed, and the slot for the keycard was painfully loud in beeping its approval into the relative silence of the Washington night. Jonathan winced slightly at the cheerful tone, whilst Nancy reflexively swivelled to scan the surroundings; beside them, Jasna shifted anxiously from foot to foot as she bit her lower lip, a movement faintly visible underneath the dark mask she wore. But, despite their nerves, despite the stress of the situation, the door nonetheless swung open on silent hinges.  


The corridor inside – it was definitely a corridor rather than a hallway, for this was not a home, was not a welcoming place at all – was lit by a pale blue lighting in strips along the ceiling, which gave the entire place a somewhat ghostly feel to it. There was a desk by the door, a reception or something of the sort, but it was empty, abandoned for the night, with papers neatly stacked in one corner and pens in a pot on the countertop beside it. A sign above the desk read _Longbow House – Department of Administrative Affairs_ in peeling black letters.  


“Right,” whispered Nancy, putting her hands on Jonathan’s and Jasna’s shoulders. “Last chance to turn back now. The cameras haven’t seen our faces, and we haven’t done the ‘entering’ part of breaking and entering yet.”  


Jonathan took a deep breath, and looked Nancy in the eye. “How sure are you about this? Do they definitely have everything we’re looking for inside here?”  


“Definitely? No. Probably? Yes.”  


“Then I’ll do it,” Jonathan said. “For you. Of course.”  


Nancy flashed him a look of gratitude. “Jasna?”  


“You don’t have to do this,” said Jonathan. “You’re not a part of this. Not if you don’t want to be.”  


“I know,” said Jasna, but did not move. She turned to face Nancy, looking at her with the same intensity that Jonathan had. “Will this help?”  


“With what?”  


“Anything,” she said, quietly. “Will it stop them from doing terrible things?”  


“I hope so,” said Nancy. “But we don’t know. We can’t know. Maybe. Possibly.”  


Jasna looked at the floor, at the sky, at the corridor, then said, “Yes. For George. For your friend. For everyone.”  


Nancy hugged Jasna, quickly and firmly, before the other girl wriggled out of the embrace awkwardly.  


“And you?” said Jonathan, a note of irony in his voice. “Are you sure, Nancy?”  


“Definitely,” she said. “For the truth.”  


The three of them walked into the building.  


The whole thing went smoothly. This was the first surprise.  


The blueprints had not lied, had not omitted any details or any traps or any secret rooms (unless, of course, they were far too secret to even be noticed). The route from the door to the Records Room was short, and relatively simple, not requiring any complicated map-reading or anything of the sort, despite the labyrinthine nature of the building. The cameras, perched high on the walls, were omnipresent, yes, but they did not swing to watch them as they walked, as illusory as this comfort might have been. And when they reached the Records Room, it was unlocked (Nancy, seeming faintly disappointed, put away the lockpicking tools which she had produced from nowhere), and they walked in.  


There was a large computer terminal attached to the wall, and not much else besides, apart from rows and rows of humming machines, wired together in a fashion suggesting an unravelled knitted scarf. Nancy, calmly, coolly, pulled up the chair, and began to slowly type commands into the computer, copying them painstakingly from a folded piece of paper, and then triumphantly hit the ‘enter’ key on the keyboard.  


The screen, hesitantly, flickering with a strange light, began to display reports, lines and lines of text, and these were the second surprise, the details they contained. Jonathan aimed his camera, focused, took the picture, and only then began to register the words on the screen.  


_PROJECT MKULTRA_ , they read, _PRODUCTIVITY REPORTS, 1965-68…_  


And Jonathan Byers fell, not physically, but mentally, plummeting down a great hole in his mind, wilfully submerging himself beneath the surface of consciousness so that only a tiny part of him – that part that was operating the camera, that told Nancy when to scroll down the screen and when to cycle onto the next document – remained in the real world. For the real world was not a place for people like him, it was clear – the documents were making this clearer, page by page, detail by detail – not for him, or for Nancy, or for Jasna; not for Will and El and his mother; not for everyone who could have been called his friend even in the most generous definition of the term. The real world was the place that contained this, that contained Longbow House, and was in turn contained within the computerised records of Longbow House, and it was not suitable for human habitation.  


The occasional word or phrase made it through his mental filter, words like _Human Experimentation_ and _Trauma Control_ and _Speculative Psychology_ and _Mass Population Manipulation_ , and somehow this was worse than consciously registering everything, because he could almost tell what sort of things would be in the gaps, and the very act of imagining this made it seem as though he was in some way complicit. Because, of course, other people had been able to imagine it beforehand; these ideas and projects and experiments and great undertakings had all sprung from human minds at one point, and had been immortalised in the bureaucratic copybooks of the American government.  


And he kept taking pictures, finishing one roll of film and automatically moving onto the next, because he could not think of anything else to do.  


A hand was shaking his shoulder, and, reluctantly, slowly, Jonathan Byers resurfaced, and looked into the pale and masked face of Nancy Wheeler.  


“Is it done?” he said.  


“I think so,” she said. “There’s more, of course. There’s always more. But we should leave now, before morning. This will be enough.”  


Jasna was sitting in the corner, curled up around herself, rhythmically breathing, and Jonathan and Nancy helped her to her feet.  


“Are you OK?” said Jonathan, gently.  


“No,” Jasna replied. “I’m not. But that’s not really that important here, is it?”  


“I mean –“  


“I know. Sorry. It’s just – I just can’t help but think about all of them, everyone who suffered, everyone mentioned in those documents, and it suddenly doesn’t seem so bad that I’m having a mental breakdown. Seems like there’s a lot of worse things that could have happened to me.”  


Nancy, silently, nodded, and slung her arm around Jasna’s shoulders. Jonathan followed suit on the other side, and, slowly, the three of them left the room, closing the door behind them with gloved hands.  


The third surprise was waiting at the end of the corridor.  


As they walked, unsteadily, back towards the outside world, the lights pulsed, just once, growing suddenly brighter and then fading back to their normal dimness in the space of a second. Then, a moment later, the security cameras, as one, swivelled to face the floor, the lights within them blinking off. The three of them picked up their pace, shooting questioning glances at one another, and then began to run, because whatever was happening, it could not be good.  


They rounded the corner, and the door was closed. And there was a familiar figure sitting beside it, waiting patiently at the desk, fiddling with a pen, and as they saw him, he turned to the three of them and smiled a smile that was completely impossible to read.  


“Good morning,” said Sam Owens.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thank you to everyone who's made it this far (and apologies for the length of this chapter - I have no impulse control when I'm writing)! Only one more to go before the end of Part One of this story...
> 
> If you enjoyed/disliked/were confused by/philosophically objected to/wanted to talk about this chapter, then please do comment! It's very much one of the high points of my week whenever I see that somebody's left a comment on this - there's few things better than talking to people about stories and fictional worlds that you both like!


	7. Invisible Sun

Mike Wheeler looked down.  


The waters of the quarry lay beneath him, grey and silent in the winter morning. A wind had picked up, ruffling the crests of the waves as they lapped against the shore on the opposite bank; it was not quite cold enough to freeze, but there was a chill in his bones nonetheless. But he did not notice this, not really.  


The wind in the trees was too quiet for him to notice, because the voice in his head was louder, repeating words from last night like a broken record.  


_Your father walked out this morning. He’s left us. He’s gone._  


He hadn’t really noticed it, the pain, when he heard those words for the first time, when his mother forced them out of wine-numb lips in the evening air. Incomprehension, yes, and a hundred unasked questions, and a guilty twinge of relief that he would not have to explain his absence, but no pain. That had come in the middle of the night, after he had helped his mother inside and calmed Holly down, after he had closed his eyes and waited for three hours for sleep to take him. It was only then, in the half-light of a full moon shining through his window, that the meaning of those words had fully dawned upon him.  


It was over. It was all over.  


No more pretence that his parents actually liked each other, beneath their quiet neglect. No more telling himself that his home life was a stable situation, a safe haven where nothing really changed. No more claims of normality, no more visions of unity, no more reason or harmony. No more lies, no more lies.  


Of course he’d known that this day was coming, known it for years, perhaps. In his heart of hearts, he had been aware for a very long time that Ted and Karen Wheeler simply did not really want to be married to each other – or, rather, did not want to have to interact with each other wherever possible, despite the unfortunate fact of their marriage. But that was the sort of belief that never emerged or showed its face, the sort that was never particularly acknowledged, since acknowledging it would have necessitated an immediate restructuring of his mental world. And now it was here, now it was real, and it was not his fault at all, and yet he still felt guilt.  


Not that his father had left, of course. There had been a time, once, back in the worst year of his life, when his parents had been arguing more than usual, and he had managed to find a way to blame himself for the entire thing. He’d explained his whole reasoning, quite succinctly, over the radio to El that night (Day 142, if he remembered correctly); if he’d only been different, he reasoned, if he’d only been more like the son his father had wanted, then perhaps there wouldn’t have been this tension that gnawed at the heart of the family at every dinnertime. If he had been stronger, or sportier, or less like himself, then perhaps his father would have enjoyed being at home, would have actually done things from time to time, rather than spending his days either inert or absent. But that was the sort of thought that had only flourished because of the general darkness of the rest of the year, and he’d grown up since then – enough to know that, whatever was the problem with the Wheeler family, it went a lot further than his own inability and unwillingness to join a baseball team.  


No, that wasn’t why he felt guilty. It was not his fault that his father was gone. It was not even, strictly speaking, his fault that he had been absent for it; government-sponsored kidnap and interrogation was a fairly decent excuse here, even if it was difficult to explain. It was something different, something deeper.  


“It’s all the same,” Mike murmured to himself, and kicked a stone down into the ashen waters of the quarry. It fell for a long time.  


Because it was, in a way. Everything was unravelling.  


El was gone, moved to another state, and for over ninety percent of his life, she was nothing more than a quiet voice on a crackling radio. Will was gone, no closer than El in distance, and a hell of a lot further emotionally than he had ever been from Mike before. Dustin and Lucas were god-knows-where, maybe on the run or maybe eaten by whatever creature had attacked the bus in the first place. Nancy was gone, and he had no idea where or why, what the reason for her absence really was. And now his father – his static, distant, silent, arbitrary, clueless, father – was gone as well, and everything was falling apart, bit by bit, and a new threat or possibly an old one was rising to the surface again, and he was alone.  


He was alone.  


“Hey,” said another voice, and Mike snapped his head round, half-expecting to see Troy or someone else who would make matters worse, but the person walking towards him was only Max.  


“What are you doing here?” said Mike. “It’s, like, five in the morning.”  


“Couldn’t sleep,” said Max. “I wanted to see if Lucas was back, so I went over to his house, but he’s not there. How come you’re awake?”  


“I didn’t sleep either,” he replied. “Needed to think.”  


“Your dad,” said Max. It was not a question.  


Mike nodded. “It’s stupid. It won’t make a difference with him gone. Same old.”  


Max lowered herself to sit next to him, and looked down into the quarry as well.  


“I get it,” she said, quietly. “I remember when my parents split. It sucked, and I hated the whole thing.”  


“But that’s the thing,” said Mike. “I don’t know if I do. I don’t know if I care, or why I would. He was a pretty terrible father.”  


He chose his next words with care, trying not to seem angry or bitter or despairing or anything like that, trying to simply state the facts. “He didn’t really like me that much. He didn’t speak to me if he didn’t have to. We’ve had, like, three conversations in the last year, and one of them was about fucking baseball. He just sat there.”  


“So why are you out here, then?”  


Mike opened his mouth, and closed it as he realised that he had no idea how to answer that question.  


“I mean,” continued Max, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to accuse you of anything, and I’m not trying to break whatever weird truce we’ve negotiated. But sitting on top of a cliff at five in the morning in January isn’t what people do when they’re fine with everything.”  


Mike hesitated, and then allowed himself to sigh, and said, “Yeah. You’re right.”  


“So?”  


“It’s all coming back, Max,” he said. “The bad men are here. The monsters are out. There’s secrets and mysteries, there’s strange things happening in Hawkins and beyond. It’s all coming back, and I don’t know what to do.”  


“Who says that you have to do anything?”  


“The story,” said Mike, with a short and bitter laugh. “That’s how it has to work. Nobody else is going to do anything about it.” And he looked up, tore his eyes from the waters below and stared at her. “And anyway, if I don’t, then everything goes wrong.”  


“What do you mean?” said Max, curiosity in her eyes.  


“Time,” said Mike, finally allowing himself to give voice to something that had mostly been internal monologue for several months. “That’s the thing. Time keeps moving, and we’ve got to run with it, keep running, because things keep happening all around us. I look away, and my father leaves. I take my eye off the ball, and I drive my best friend away. And I argue with people, and annoy people, and provoke people, and then they’re dead, and there’s no time to apologise…”  


He took a deep breath.  


“We’re running out of time,” he said.  


“Bullshit,” said Max. “It’s just started.”  


Mike shook his head emphatically. “Doesn’t matter. We’re still running out of time. And I don’t know what to do this time round.”  


There was a silence, and then Max laughed.  


“Excuse me, what?” said Mike, unsure exactly what emotion to settle on.  


“Sorry,” she said, somehow, inexplicably, amused. “But what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”  


“I just told you,” said Mike, feeling the annoyance rise within him. “I don’t know what to do. How to win.”  


“Yeah,” said Max, her voice growing more serious. “But why do you think it’s got to be different this time?”  


“Because last time, I screwed up,” said Mike. “We lost. Not everything. But we lost.”  


Max gestured grandly around them. “You think? The world’s still here.”  


“Not all of it.”  


“Most of it.”  


The silence fell again, as both of them mustered their thoughts. Max was quicker.  


“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Whatever else happened, you did something right. Sure, you were a dick to Will, but he’s still alive. You were a fucking terrible boyfriend to El – don’t argue with me, I’m not saying you haven’t improved – but you protected her in Starcourt with me, and put yourself between her and that monster. You might not know how to stop everything this time, but that’s fine, you know, since you never did beforehand anyway.”  


Mike said nothing, but looked at her, fear and hope warring within him.  


“You don’t need to win,” said Max. “Or, rather, you don’t need to figure out how we’re going to win. That’s never been your role in this whole fucked-up parody of an extended family.”  


“No,” said Mike. “Not a family. A Party. And you’re right.”  


“We came so close to having one conversation that wasn’t about D&D,” muttered Max, but there was a smile there as well.  


“You’re right,” repeated Mike, the whole atmosphere feeling almost dreamlike, almost surreal. “I know my role. I’m the Paladin. I protect my friends.”  


“And it doesn’t matter if you get it wrong,” added Max, “since everyone else here is messing up as well. Just, you know, get better.”  


Mike swung his legs back onto the ground, stood, stepped away from the cliff.  


“You’re right,” he said. “Thanks, Max.”  


“Any time, Wheeler,” she said, smirking slightly. “God, I’m good.”  


And he let her have that, because she was, and because she was right. _I don’t need to solve this whole thing alone. The world doesn’t revolve around me. I just need to help my friends, and protect them, and do the best I can, and we’ll win, we’ll win, together._  


Mike Wheeler was back.  


*******  


Maria Glenny opened the door on the first knock, as though she had been sitting on the doormat and waiting for someone to arrive. For all Will knew, she had.  


“Hi, Maria,” said El, who had been the one to knock. “Are you alright?”  


She did not need to shake her head for the answer to this question to be fairly clear to Will. Her eyes were dry, but red from crying, and her hair was messy and unkempt; it was evidently the look of someone who had not been having a good day.  


“Dad’s gone missing,” she said, in an impressively steady voice. “Nobody knows where he is. He was supposed to come back yesterday evening for dinner, but he never did, and I stayed up all night waiting, and he still isn’t back, and…”  


She trailed off, a catch in her tone. El took two confident steps forward, then – somewhat mechanically – put her arms around Maria to comfort her. Will glanced awkwardly at Josh out of the corner of his eye, but he appeared just as unsure about how to react to the situation as well, so the pair of them merely stood there, until El relinquished her grip on Maria.  


“We think we can help,” she said. “We know where to look.”  


Whatever Maria had evidently been expecting in the form of sympathy, it was not that, for she almost choked on a deep breath, and stared up at the three of them with an uncertain hope in her eyes. “Wait, what?”  


“There’s been a few disappearances or things like that lately,” said Josh. “And they all seem to be centred around the forest, south of town.”  


“Erm, OK,” said Maria. “Sorry, but who are you guys again?”  


“My brother Will,” said El, “and my friend Josh. We’ve been doing research in the library, so we know where to go now.”  


“We should go now,” said Will, and had no idea exactly what had possessed him to say this. “I think it’s urgent.”  


Josh swivelled his head to stare in Will’s general direction. “What do you mean?”  


“I don’t know,” said Will, “I don’t know why I said that, but I think it’s true. It feels like something’s coming, something big. We need to move quickly.”  


El stared at him as well, looked into his eyes with a grim seriousness, then nodded. “I believe you.”  


“Where are we going?” said Maria. “To the forest?”  


“You don’t have to –“  


“Yeah, well, I’m going to come with you whether you like it or not. If my dad needs help, I’m going to be there for him, so let’s go.”  


Nobody had anything to say to that. It seemed fair enough.  


It probably wasn’t a long walk. That was probably the reason why Will did not register most of it, because it was a quick and easy journey, along familiar roads. Or possibly because he was terrified of whatever force had chased them earlier. That would work as well.  


But he knew, deep down, that there was something more than this, something else drawing his focus away from the world at hand. Something else causing the dark, swirling sensation in his stomach, the shortness of breath, the semi-familiar prickles of dread.  


It was growing dark by the time that they arrived at the forest, and the shadows had already lengthened so that they stood several times the size of their material counterparts. The wind was beginning to pick up as well, blowing a cold breeze in from the sea, and a light rain was beginning to fall.  


“Where now?” said Josh, turning to him and El. “I mean, forests are pretty big, so…”  


“I’m not sure,” admitted Will. “The newspapers weren’t too specific, so I suppose we should just try and find anything that looks suspicious, weird, anything out of the ordinary.”  


“No splitting up,” said El, pointing an accusing finger at Josh.  


“I wasn’t going to – at no point did I suggest –“  


“What sort of strange things are we looking for?” asked Maria.  


“Anything,” said Will. “Footprints, things that have been dropped, holes in the world, signs of a disturbance, anything like that.”  


“Holes in the world?” said Josh, back in his well-worn tone of incomprehension.  


“What?”  


“That’s what you said. You said ‘holes in the world’ in the middle of your list.”  


“I don’t think I did,” objected Will, feeling again that strange mental haziness.  


“You definitely did. We all heard you.”  


El nodded, and Maria twitched her head slightly in confirmation.  


“That’s a weird thing, right there,” said Josh. “Does that count?”  


“Probably,” said El. “Let’s start looking.”  


They were around ten metres into the forest when they saw the light, a flickering red in the distance, and they began to walk towards it.  


“Fire,” whispered El, somewhat unnecessarily, and Will nodded, trying as hard as he could to ignore the swaying feeling that was beginning to creep into his conscious thoughts. Silhouetted on the other side of the fire was a figure, and Maria – before anyone could stop her – ran towards it, shouting, “Dad! Dad! It’s me!”  


With no real alternatives, the other three followed her, running over the pine-needle-carpeted floor, avoiding branches and stumps, and emerged into a clearing, where a thin man was tied beside a fire, shaking his head in fear.  


“Maria,” he said, “you need to run, now. Get out of here. It’s not safe.”  


Maria ignored him, and began trying to untie the knots he was held with; Josh ran over to help him, and Will went to follow, but – as he did so – one of his legs gave way, and he stumbled to the floor.  


“No time,” he said, again without any real idea why he had said this. “Too late. We’re too late.”  


And, dimly visible beyond the circle of light, stepping slowly and methodically through the trees, four or five figures were approaching. El picked up a heavy stick from the floor, holding it as if it were a sword, and Maria finished untying the final knot, and her father slumped to the floor, and Josh moved to stand between Will and the shapes, and the wind howled, and the rain began to fall.  


And there, in the wind and the rain, in the darkness of a Virginia forest at dusk, in the grip of returning memory, Will Byers understood. The haziness, the weakness he was feeling, the sharp prickles of dread and emotions that were not entirely his own.  


He pushed himself to his feet, supporting himself by pure force of will alone.  


“Everyone,” he said, his voice quiet but firm, “get close to the fire.”  


“Why?” said Maria.  


“Because he likes it cold,” said Will. “It’s _him_. He’s back.”  


*******  


“Please,” said Owens, politely, “have a seat.”  


He gestured towards an open door to a conference room or something of the sort, and it was clear that it was not a request, but an order. They sat.  


“First things first,” Owens continued, “I’m going to need that camera, Mr Byers.”  


“Why?” asked Jonathan, but he seemed to already know the answer, from the resignation in his tone.  


“You know that I can’t let you leave with the information in those pictures,” said Owens. “I’m sorry, but that’s quite clearly not going to happen. The camera, please.”  


Jonathan glanced at Nancy, and she nodded slightly, for she too was fairly sure that they had no alternative. He slid the camera across the table, and Owens picked it up to examine it, and Nancy was reminded, very briefly, of the autumn of 1983, and of Steve smashing this camera’s predecessor against the floor of the school parking lot. But Owens did nothing so violent; he simply slid the roll of film out and pocketed it, and then looked enquiringly at Jonathan, until – with a sigh – the young man retrieved the other roll of film from his bag and relinquished it.  


“That’s better,” said Owens, allowing himself a friendly smile. “Thank you. Now, I think we need to talk.”  


“Yeah,” said Nancy, leaning forwards. “I think we do. I’ve got a few questions.”  


Owens chuckled, but it was a weary laugh. “Oh, Miss Wheeler, of course you do. I can’t exactly say that I’m surprised. Ask away.”  


She paused for a moment, because she had expected a lot more resistance than this, but then picked the first thing that came to mind. “What happened to Kline?”  


Owens blinked. “After he was impeached and arrested for misusing public funds, he was formally charged and sent to a small state prison in the north of Indiana. He is still there now, receiving visits from his wife every other week.”  


“What really happened to him?”  


Owens smiled slightly. “We had a few questions to ask him, afterwards. He knew more than he was supposed to, from everyone’s perspective; he’d been passing secrets to the Soviets for money, and in return had been squirrelling information about their little operation away as potential blackmail material. We were able to extract a lot of this information from him, and have been preparing our own operations against the Soviet Union with the help of this.”  


“And when you say ‘extract’…” said Jasna, in a quiet voice, questioning, and Owens nodded.  


“Yes, he was interrogated, and possibly tortured.” Owens rubbed his eyes, looking a lot older than he initially had.  


Nancy considered for a moment, and then nodded. “OK. Second question. How come you were able to arrive at Starcourt with an army in the nick of time? You’re a doctor, a researcher, or you were, at least. How come you’ve got soldiers at your beck and call now?”  


Owens chuckled ironically. “Because I survived in 1984, I suppose, and nobody else did. After your friend closed the Gate, I was in quite a position to climb up the ranks, because I had knowledge that nobody else did, and – as it turned out – I was something of a natural at playing the game. Sure, I’d been on that side of things for a long time – they don’t put you in charge of Hawkins Lab or somewhere like that if you’ve only just graduated – but, you know, a year is a long time in politics.”  


“What do we call you now, then?” asked Jonathan, his tone just a fraction of a note away from bitterness. “Not just a doctor any more, I take it?”  


“Oh, no,” said Owens. “I absolutely am. Doctor Sam J. Owens, simple, harmless, old Doc. That’s the official line.”  


“So what’s the truth?” said Nancy.  


Owens fiddled with the pen in his hand for a moment, and then spoke. “You kids want a quick honours class in government and politics?”  


The three of them looked at him, questioningly.  


“Here’s how it works,” said Owens. “The government of the United States, since it was founded in the late eighteenth century, has been divided into an executive, a legislature, and a judiciary. The separation of powers. Madison and Jefferson wrote on it; it’s all originally from Montesquieu. We have regular elections to the executive – that’s the President – and to the legislative houses of Congress, so that the people of the United States of America can choose their leaders, decide who’s responsible for governing them. The President is elected by the people, and chooses a government to help him – don’t look at me like that, Miss Konstanjević, it’s always a him – execute the laws of the land. Congress is elected by the people, and it writes the laws of the land through debate and consultation. The courts, all the way up to the top, are accountable to the people as well, and they enforce the laws of the land, prosecute those who break them. It’s a clear, well-structured system. It’s democracy. It’s also a complete and utter lie.”  


Silence.  


“That’s not how it really works,” Owens continued. “Hasn’t been for a long time. Maybe never. The people with real power are the ones who don’t stand for office, don’t declare a party allegiance, don’t come out into the open. Half the time, they’re not even entirely in the political structure at all, but they’ve got one foot in banks, the oil companies, the private armies. And there’s a whole world there, tucked away, neatly positioned out of view, and that’s the government.”  


“Right,” said Nancy. “Government corruption, great, everyone knows that.”  


“It’s a heck of a lot more than just that,” said Owens. “It’s two different things, occasionally overlapping when they have to. The official government does the useful stuff, the visible stuff. They build roads and schools. The real government does the important stuff – foreign policy, espionage, defence, fixing elections – and make no mistake, if the two ever go up against each other, there’s only going to be one winner there.”  


He rubbed his eyes again.  


“The real government,” he continued, “the shadow government, if you like, that’s hierarchical as well, in a way, but it’s a lot less clear. There aren’t any presidents or secretaries of state, no chains of command – there’s just factions, and loose alignments, and individuals who play the game with each other, taking power in different areas for their own advancement or for their own idea of the public good.”  


“Which one are you?” said Jonathan.  


“The latter, I hope,” said Owens, but smiled a dark and not entirely happy smile. “But who knows. Playing the game tends to change your idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. Only a year ago, at the Lab, I refused to let them kill young Will Byers to stop the contagion, Entity Orpheus, the Mind Flayer, whatever you want to call it. Now, I’m not sure if I made the right call there. I don’t know if I’d do the same again.”  


“That was my brother –“  


“And those were a hundred people in the Lab. Or, if they don’t count as innocents, which is fair and understandable, then what about the thirty or forty people who died this summer? You don’t think they had brothers and sisters as well?”  


Jonathan had nothing to say to that.  


“I get it,” said Nancy, trying to keep her tone calm. “You’re telling us that you’re the greater good.”  


“Oh, believe me,” said Owens, “if you’d seen my competition, you’d agree.”  


“Your competition?” said Jasna.  


Owens scratched the back of his neck with the pen. “I told you that there were factions. Well, in the spooky side of the shadow government – paranormal affairs, dimensional research, the remnants of Brenner’s camp – there’s someone else trying to take that over, bring it into his own power base. Name’s Jack Beeching. He’s a military man – not Department of Energy, like I am, although that’s more aesthetics than anything – trying to make it big. Started with some mercenary company that does our dirty work in Central America, then hopped to the secret service, then made it backstage. He’s got a lot of influence in foreign policy these days, and he’s been trying to move into the power vacuum Brenner left with the Upside-Down and everything relating to that, conducting dimensional experiments at his fortress down in Ansted. Trying to take over the Hawkins account, as it were. In a way, I’ve only got myself to blame.” He smiled ruefully.  


“What’s that supposed to mean?”  


“Well,” said Owens. “God knows I shouldn’t be telling you this, but, frankly, I’ve lost the inclination to care too much about all the official secrets any more. Didn’t you ever wonder why you never heard from Brenner again?”  


“The fact that he got his head bitten off by the Demogorgon wasn’t a good enough reason?” said Jonathan.  


“No,” breathed Nancy. “Because he didn’t, did he? If he had, you wouldn’t have admitted it, so the fact that you did…”  


Owens smiled, almost approvingly. “That would be far too easy if he’d just died. But no, he’s alive. Still is, as far as I know. But he couldn’t go back to his old work; he’d slipped up too many times, and, frankly, could have been arrested by the Chief with the evidence you’d gathered. And then that would have made things really rather messy all round; he’d try to escape, his allies would try and have you kids killed or discredited, his enemies would have thrown themselves into the fray. So I found an easier solution. I let him flee to the Soviet Union, and as a result of that, could consolidate myself in Hawkins Lab and mop up most of his old resources. I was able to shut down the more unethical of his old projects – no more MKUltra, no more eugenics – and focus purely on the Upside-Down instead. Best I know, he’s still out there in Kamchatka; Beeching tried to get him back, but I helped the Soviets trick him at the prisoner exchange. We don’t want someone like that back in the game.”  


A silence fell across the table. Nancy had no idea what to say, and by the look on his face, nor did Jonathan.  


Finally, Jasna spoke. “Why?” she said.  


“Why don’t we want Brenner, who conducted experiments on the brains of children, back?”  


“No,” she said, shaking her head in clarification. “I’m not really following most of this, but that part seems fairly clear. I mean, why are you doing any of this?”  


“Because,” said Owens, and the smile had not left his face, although it had never reached his eyes, “that’s how the government works. That’s how the country works. The best anyone can do is try and turn the whole thing to a slightly better end. Shut down the child-torture, try and call off the Contras, speak out against further nuclear proliferation.”  


He sighed.  


“Nancy,” he said, “Jonathan, Jasna. I made a promise, over a year ago, to a man who is now dead. I promised that I would try to keep you all safe, to protect you. You two, who got Hawkins Lab shut down. El Hopper, who is still legally government property, and who is the most promising scientific breakthrough we’ve made this last decade. Will Byers, who is the best case study in existence about the effect of close contact between humans and extra-dimensional entities. The other children, who have stumbled across more classified information in two years than any citizen is meant to in their entire life. Everyone. I promised Jim, and I will not betray the man who saved my life.”  


There was a heavy silence, and then he chuckled. “Anyway. Better get you three out of here, before the early morning shift arrives. I’ve wiped this whole conversation from the security system, as well as your break-in, but there’s a limit to how many awkward questions I can field.” With that, he stood up, and beckoned the three of them to do the same. Slowly, hesitantly, glancing between one another, they stood as well, and followed him to the door.  


As he opened it, he turned to them, and said, “Listen. I’m telling you this as – well, not a friend, but an ally. Nancy, Jonathan, you have to let this whole thing go. Absolutely nothing good can come of your little quest.”  


“Is that a threat?” said Jonathan.  


“No,” said Owens. “It’s a warning. Because I can’t protect you forever, not if you keep doing this. Sooner or later, you’ll meet someone who isn’t scared of me, or who doesn’t mind the consequences of hurting or killing you. And, even without that, whatever you find – will it make you happy?”  


“If it’s the truth,” said Nancy, “then that’s not important.”  


“Then I salute your idealism,” said Owens, “and I will salute it as they bury you. You want the truth? Here’s the truth: we live in a country that does not abide by the rule of law and is not governed by the will of the people, and there is nothing that you, or me, or the President himself, can do about that. The best we can do is find a niche for ourselves and make things as good as we can from there.”  


He jerked his head, indicating that it was time for them to leave, and – feeling almost jetlagged, prematurely weary and awake at the same time – Nancy stepped out of the door, Jonathan and Jasna following.  


“I liked you better when we could blackmail you,” muttered Nancy under her breath, and Owens was not meant to hear, but he evidently did, because he let out what sounded like a genuine chuckle.  


“Me too,” he said, and closed the door on them.  


*******  


It was well into the morning by the time that the nondescript and battered RV wound its way into Hawkins along back roads from the south, having taken the most circuitous and indirect route imaginable back from Ansted. Murray had vetoed around thirty towns in the lower Appalachians before a starving Dustin and Lucas had mutinied and threatened to jump out of the moving vehicle, and the brief stop they were begrudgingly allowed in a tiny place called Elkhorn City seemed only to have made him more paranoid, resulting in a detour for several hours south to Nashville. Lucas had fallen asleep at this point, fed up with the entire enterprise, and only returned to himself when Dustin prodded him in the shoulder and said, “Wake up, Lucas. We’re home.”  


And they were. It looked no different – for why should it? – but nevertheless filled Lucas with a strange sense of nostalgia, longing for how it had been before their journey to the new Byers house. Or, rather, longing for how he had been – a slightly different and happier person, not troubled by alien creatures in the night or the prospect of those close to him being held in a military prison, concerned primarily with the far more complex and ineffable business of real life.  


But it was a false nostalgia, he reflected. Even before this weekend, there had still been dreams of demodogs and shadow creatures and Billy Hargrove’s flick-knife. For the last two years, real life had been quite evidently a series of ceasefires, breathing-space before the next catastrophe, rather than anything fun or idyllic. There never was a golden age.  


The RV stopped for Dustin first, a couple of blocks away from his house in a quiet layby, and Dustin jumped out as though he had left the gas on, pausing only to cursorily thank Murray and to reassure Lucas that he would be in touch on the Supercomm later that day. With that, he sprinted off, and Lucas did not entirely blame him, knowing what he did about the protective instincts of Claudia Henderson.  


“I can get out here too,” offered Lucas, when Murray made no move to return to the driver’s seat. “It’s not too far to walk, and I could do with the exercise.”  


“Suits me,” said Murray. “I’ve got errands to run here too. Didn’t exactly drive the two of you back here out of the kindness of my heart.”  


Lucas snorted. “Sure. Forgot that you couldn’t be vaguely friendly for five seconds.”  


“I’m not your babysitter, kid,” said Murray. “Don’t go getting confused about that.”  


“Wasn’t a mistake I was going to make,” said Lucas. “My parents tend to only hire people who don’t have a second job in Moscow.”  


Murray looked at him sideways. “You really are bothered by my old Soviet connections, aren’t you? What’s got under your skin – the idea that I’m going to collectivise your Dungeons and Dragons figurines?”  


“Fuck you,” said Lucas, automatically, then thought about the question in earnest. “No. It’s the fact that my dad fought communists in Vietnam, for two years of his life, and you’re on the same side as the guys that tried to kill him.”  


Murray smiled a half-smile without much mirth, and leaned back against the wall of the RV. “I see. You don’t like me being on the other team as your dearest daddy. Here’s the thing, though – I don’t think I am.”  


“What do you mean?”  


“Your dad,” said Murray. “Was he a volunteer? Did he choose to waste two years wandering around the jungles of Southeast Asia?”  


“No,” said Lucas. “Drafted. What’s your point?”  


“My point is simply this,” said Murray, his tone satisfied. “Who did he have more in common with – the bankers and politicians in Washington, or the Vietnamese farmers who were forced to fight when another country invaded them? Hey, the American government’s been after you – who do you have more in common with?”  


“That’s not the same, though,” said Lucas. “The Russians were funding the Vietnamese–“  


“The Vietnamese voted for Ho Chi Minh in their elections,” said Murray. “They wanted a communist in charge, and they got invaded for it. Because Ho Chi Minh was on the other team. Just like how you’re worried by me, because you think I’m on the other team to you, even if you’re probably not.”  


“Fine,” said Lucas. “Maybe the whole idea of teams is bullshit. I’m not going to automatically praise the communists because the USA invaded them without good reason. There’s a lot of other reasons to oppose them as well – there’s the dictatorship, and the prison camps, and the secret police –“  


“All of which you’ve got here in America as well, in one form or another,” commented Murray. “But you’re right. The whole idea of teams is bullshit, and the Soviet Union’s made an absolute disaster of things. Fortunately, there’s a lot of other ways to do things too.”  


“Like what?”  


Murray was smiling again, as he picked up a stack of books. “The Soviet Union is based around one very particular, and bizarre, interpretation of Marxist political philosophy and economics. It was revised heavily by Lenin, and cannibalised by Stalin, and then shuffled repeatedly by Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Andropov and half a dozen other ancient bureaucrats. There’s a lot of other ways to do things.”  


He began to hand some of the books and pamphlets to Lucas, who accepted them in confusion.  


“Plekhanov was a talentless hack, but sporadically interesting,” he said, nevertheless passing his work over. “Kautsky is readable but horrendously impractical; Lukács is practical but unreadable. Luxemburg, Bernstein, Gramsci, they’ve all got a lot of bright ideas, even if they all contradict each other and sometimes themselves. And here’s the foundation of it all.”  


A much larger book, with a completely blank cover, was added to the top of the stack.  


“Collected works of Marx and Engels,” said Murray. “ _Grundrisse_ , German Ideology, _Judenfrage_ , Capital, Eighteenth Brumaire, and the Communist Manifesto itself. Try not to kill yourself in the bits about microeconomics.”  


“Why are you giving me this?” said Lucas.  


“Oh, it’s far too cluttered in here,” said Murray.  


“Clean RV, clean mind?”  


“Something like that. But no, obviously that’s not the reason. You ever wondered why you need to salute the flag every morning in school?”  


“Sure,” said Lucas. “Every black kid wonders that sometimes.”  


“Get ‘em young,” said Murray. “That’s why. If they, the government, get you before you can think for yourself, then they can put all the right thoughts in your head. The flag, the nation, the virulent hatred of anything that could even vaguely be labelled communist. Then, when you grow up, you can pass that on to your kids as well.”  


“So what’s all this?” said Lucas, lifting the stack of books.  


“The antidote,” said Murray, smiling crookedly. “You asked me what other ways there are to do things, what the choices are beyond Washington or Moscow. Here’s how you work it out for yourself.”  


Lucas considered this, trying to ignore the weight of the books and focus on what they represented, and then nodded curtly. “Thanks. I guess.”  


“You’re welcome, kid,” said Murray. “Have fun with this. I know I did, when I was your age. Now, get out of my RV. I’ve got secret conspiracy theorist stuff to do, and no offence, but I don’t entirely trust you yet.”  


“Like you ever will,” muttered Lucas, but obligingly stepped down onto the ground of Hawkins.  


He was home.  


*******  


As the fraying car raced along the silent roads of Winterton, Joyce Byers tightened her fingers around the gun, and hoped against hope that she was not too late.  


Somehow, she seemed to know where she was heading, freeing her mind to consider other matters; or, rather, one particular other thing. It was back, that same creature – that thing – which had possessed and invaded Will, which had almost killed all the children at the Mall; the dark shapes dancing and pulsating beneath the skin of the man she had just shot (and this, too, would have been a larger concern were it not for the immediate circumstances) were very familiar, looking for all the world like that shadow which had poured out of the mouth of her son in a burning room in December. In the past two years, her paranoia had developed an alarming habit of being invariably right, and she was tired of that.  


There was the flickering of a fire in the distance, and she turned towards that, since it was as good a lead as any, and the strange instinct guiding her had no complaints. And then she was as close as the road would allow, so – putting thoughts of insurance out of her mind – she swerved sharply off the tarmac and into the forest, weaving between the pine trees and bracing herself against the roughness of the terrain, until a painful, crashing, thud shook the car, and she heard the tearing noise of metal against rock. She did not allow herself to waste time worrying about this, but jumped out, grabbing the axe from the passenger seat as she did, and began to run towards the fire, leaving the car still running.  


The evening was getting on now, and her eyes were not accustomed to the darkness away from the car’s headlights, but as she ran, desperately trying not to twist her ankles on tree-stumps or stones, her vision began to adjust, and the scene around the fire became clear.  


The burning had spilled out across the forest floor, and was evidently being encouraged in this by the four children gathered around it, one of whom was throwing whatever sticks they could find onto the blaze. An older man lay slumped on the floor, concerningly close to the edge of the flames, but the children paid him little heed, hurling stones and brandishing sticks at the other figures which stalked closer and closer. There were four or five of these taller figures, moving slowly and deliberately, whispering faintly as they did, but Joyce was too far from them to hear the words they mouthed.  


Two of the silhouettes were very familiar, even though the faces of Will and El were in shadow. The others were less clear, but this did not seem tremendously important.  


“Leave us alone,” said Will, his voice weak, and Joyce felt a stab of protectiveness even as – for whatever reason – her pace slowed, and she slid into the shadows behind a tree. “Just leave us alone.”  


“No,” said one of the figures, in the same hesitant, absent voice that she had heard back at the house a few minutes earlier. “We need you. Both of you.”  


“What for?” asked one of the other children.  


“To become ourselves again,” said another figure. They were circling now, Joyce was sure of it, circling the spreading fire like a pack of wolves.  


“We need your minds,” said a third one.  


“She doesn’t –“ began Will, before El shook her head urgently at him.  


“Who are you?” asked the fourth of the children, a shorter girl.  


“We will discover that,” said a figure, as they began to tighten the circle.  


“You cannot prevent us,” said another.  


“You cannot escape us,” said another.  


“You have no saviours,” said another.  


And this seemed to Joyce like a perfect cue, so she aimed, and with a cold calmness, fired the gun for the second time that day, and – as one of the figures stumbled – strode into the firelight, and said, “Yes, they do.”  


As one, the figures turned to stare at her, their eyes hollow and absent, and their skin covered in the same dancing shapes as before. She stared back, unafraid.  


Because, frankly, she was not afraid in the slightest. The time for that had come and gone a long time ago. She had her gun and her axe. She knew who the monsters were. She had people to protect.  


Joyce Byers stared into the vacant eyes of the Mind Flayer’s puppets, and they were the first to look away.  


“If you don’t leave my children alone,” she said, her voice flat and deadly, “I will kill every last one of you.”  


One of them tilted their head, and said, “We need them. We need their memories.”  


“What the hell does that even mean?” asked Joyce.  


“They know us,” said another, tilting its head in the same way, as the first figure straightened to normal. “They have understood us before.”  


“So what?”  


“We need that understanding,” said a third, again tilting its head. “We must become who we are.”  


“I don’t understand a single word that you’re saying,” said Joyce.  


One of the figures made a noise of frustration, oddly human. “We are merely a vestige of the greater whole, a fragment of Us, cut away and alone. We need to recover the knowledge of what we were.”  


“I understand,” said Will, his voice quiet.  


“Me too,” said El, nodding in agreement. “We saw the Mind Flayer. You forgot how to be the Mind Flayer. You want our memories.”  


“So you can rebuild yourself,” continued Will. “Like worms, cut in two, regrowing. But you didn’t get the half with the brain in it.”  


One of the figures smiled mechanically. “But the knowledge is here nonetheless. Even if we are isolated in this bright hot world, severed from Us, we are not aimless.”  


“You have the knowledge of how to be Us, and we will take it,” said another.  


“We will make ourselves whole again,” said a third. “We will reclaim our identity. We will become a new Us, and make your bright world dark.”  


“You can try,” warned Joyce, “but I’ll shoot you if you take a single step. All of you. And burn the bodies.”  


As one, the five figures tilted their heads, as if considering her words, and then took a step back, beginning to retreat back into the forest.  


“We can wait,” said one. “We have time.”  


“Your memories are going nowhere,” said another.  


“We can find new hosts,” said another. “Take the memories when you are defenceless.”  


“You will be ours,” said another. “You will be Us.”  


And, as silently as they had arrived, they were gone, fading away into the rainy darkness, beyond the light of the spluttering fire, beyond the eyes of the people who stood around it, beyond comprehension and knowledge.  


But they would be back, Joyce Byers thought, as she pulled her children into a tight hug, as she guided the five others back towards the car, helping to support the pallid, faded man, wearily trying to reassure the children, who were probably beyond the point of needing reassurance anyway by now. They always came back.  


On the other hand, she would be ready as well.  


*******  


From the level of the street, it was clear that people were awake in the apartment above, and Jasna took a deep breath as she mentally prepared herself, and then said to Nancy and Jonathan, “You two stay down here for now. I’m just going to grab some things, and then I’ll be back.”  


“Are you sure?” said Nancy, sounding still slightly flustered and confused. “We can help you carry things, if you want –“  


“Nance,” said Jonathan, softly, and sent an untranslatable glance at her, shaking his head by a couple of inches, and she subsided, looking at Jasna with a new understanding.  


“I won’t be long,” said Jasna, and – gritting her teeth – she pushed open the door, and climbed the stairs, and came home.  


Her parents were waiting for her in the living room, and had clearly been preparing for her return. There was an awful silence hanging over the room, and Jasna did not know how – whether – to break it, so she merely stood there, in the doorway, her heart hammering and her coat drawn around her like a cloak.  


“All night,” said her mother, eventually, almost a whisper. “All night, we’ve been waiting for you. Where on earth have you been, Jasna?”  


“I didn’t mean to worry you,” she began, and then trailed off, because it was the wrong tone, the wrong starting position, for what she needed to say, but it seemed too late to change course now.  


“We have been sitting here and worrying,” her mother continued, “that you and those – classmates of yours had been getting yourselves into trouble. That you’d been led astray by them.”  


“Do you know,” said her father, “we were half-expecting the police to call us. To tell us that you’d been arrested, taken into custody, for drinking or drugs or making a public nuisance of yourself. Do you know how that would have reflected on the family?”  


Inexplicably, a surge of laughter threatened to burst out of Jasna, which she only just managed to contain. Of course that was what they would have been worried about – the possibility that their daughter, their only child, the one unpredictable rogue element in their world, would have somehow done something to undermine or damage their lives. Not her safety, or her happiness, but what she meant for them.  


“Jasna, we shouldn’t have to say how disappointed we are,” said her mother. “You have disgraced yourself tonight, and there must be consequences for that. You will not be allowed out of the apartment any more, except to go to school, and your books will be confiscated for no fewer than three months. As for those two others who were here earlier – you are not to associate with them again, under any circumstances, even if you think that we will not hear about it, because we will.”  


“The pair of them will only keep getting you into trouble,” said her father. “Quite aside from that, it’s frankly embarrassing to see you following them around, trying to be a third part of their couple. You need to abandon them, focus on your studies. You should know by now that nobody really wants to be friends with you, unless they’re trying to get something out of it or out of you.”  


“The Konstanjević family is perfectly good enough by itself,” said her mother. “And these people, who you might think are your friends, will make you lose sight of that, will make you lose sight of your place in the world. You belong here with us.”  


And there were so many things she could have said to that. She could almost see them, a vast array of possible conversations, stretching out before her like the Garden of Forking Paths. She could have broken down and wept, and apologised to them, told them that she would be better from now on. She could have nodded blankly, and allowed them to continue tearing apart any remaining shreds of self-worth until they were satisfied. She could have asked them why she belonged with them when they never paid attention to her unless a job needed to be done, and fought, and died on that hill. She could have tried to defend Nancy and Jonathan; she could have attempted to negotiate the terms of her imprisonment; she could have ran to her room and done her best to hide herself away from everything.  


Instead, she said, “What did you do at the office today?”  


They clearly had no idea quite how to react to this, and – for a split-second – Jasna entertained the possibility that her non-sequitur had managed to confuse them so much that they forgot their anger.  


“Marko,” said her mother, turning to her father, “she has not been listening to a single word we’ve been saying. She has no respect for us whatsoever.”  


“Jasna,” said her father, thunder beginning to brew in the depths of his voice, “you need to understand how important this is. You need to realise that you are undermining the very foundations of this family with your recklessness, your disobedience. You need to accept that we are telling you what to do here.”  


“I’ll ask again,” she said, bravely, biting her lip to stop herself from panicking. “What did you do at work today, Father? What cases were you working on, Mother?”  


“Why is this in any way important?” asked her mother.  


“Because I know,” said Jasna. “I’ve been to Longbow House tonight. I saw it all, Mother. Everything.”  


“You did what –“ began her father, now definitely angry, but – somehow – Jasna held up her hand, and he miraculously fell quiet, allowed her to continue.  


“When my grandparents, your parents, came to America,” said Jasna, her voice shaking, “they were refugees, fleeing from the Ustaše and the Četniks and the Nazis, just so that you could live somewhere peaceful, somewhere free. They believed in the American Dream, in liberty and democracy and the rule of law, believed in it so strongly that they uprooted themselves and crossed an ocean out of hope and principle. And you have betrayed them, your own parents, because you have stood by and watched – no, actively assisted – the people here doing the same thing that they fled from. You have given legal advice to men who experiment on children. You have participated in government coverups of the deaths of innocents. You sued their grieving parents. You have been at the right hand of the architects of every single atrocity committed in this country in the last twenty years or more. It was you, Mother. It was you, Father. It was all you.”  


“I don’t know what you think you saw at Longbow House –“ began her mother, but – feeling the adrenaline flowing in her veins – Jasna continued, not daring to stop.  


“Yes, you do,” she said. “I saw the truth, and you know it, even if it was hidden again the moment I stepped away. I know that you know. And you cannot know, there is no way you know, what is actually happening, have this much power, and still be good people. I tried to make excuses for you, really, I tried, for so many years. I tried to tell myself that you were strict because you cared, that you were cruel to be kind in the long term. I tried to convince myself that you loved me in your own strange way. But no, I can’t do it any more. I can’t believe – I can’t – that you can love anyone and still do the things you do, stand with the people you work for. You are on the side of the monsters, Mother. You are on the side of the fascists, Father. And I will not be part of this any longer.”  


Her hands quivering with nervous energy, she reached forward, and grabbed her handbag from the coffee table, where she had left it eight hours and a lifetime earlier, and she turned her back on her parents, and stepped out through the still-open door.  


“Jasna,” her mother said. Her voice was pleading, now, so much weaker. “You can’t go – you mustn’t go – we can explain everything –“  


“There’s really nothing left to be explained,” said Jasna, as she began to walk, across the landing, to the stairwell, down one step, then two, then four, until she was running down the stairs, feeling freedom, and joy, and terrible, terrible grief, and another sensation as well, one that she did not think she had ever felt before. It felt like the planet had suddenly, abruptly, begun to turn the other way around its axis, like a sudden and deafening silence had fallen after a great sound which had lasted her entire life. It felt like the world was rearranging itself into a new pattern, brimming with new possibilities.  


It felt like a new story.  


She was still running as she left that apartment building for very possibly the last time in her life, into the cold air and onto the freezing sidewalk, but she did not slip, for that was something that the old Jasna would have done, and now she was free, and she almost did not notice the tears streaming down her face as she climbed into Jonathan’s car, still parked on the side of the street as the sun began to rise.  


“Are you alright?” asked Nancy, as she sat down and closed the door.  


“I’m fine,” said Jasna. “I’m fine. I’m absolutely fine.”  


Jonathan turned to her, and there was a deep understanding in his rueful half-smile.  


“It’s done,” said Jasna. “It’s over now.”  


“No,” said Nancy, and the light of morning shone through the thin strands of her hair and glinted in the pupils of her eyes. “It’s only just beginning.”  


“Where are you going now?” asked Jasna.  


“Back to Hawkins,” said Jonathan.  


“Can…can I come with you?” said Jasna, and her voice almost betrayed her, although she was fairly sure that the tears had already done that job.  


Nancy looked at her, and Jasna could not meet her gaze, the brilliance of her eyes and the compassionate intensity of her stare. “Of course you can. Do you – do you want to talk about it now? About them?”  


Jasna shook her head, screwing her eyes up against the glare of the sunlight and the radiance of Nancy’s face, still basking in that strange blend of triumph and despair. “Let’s just go.”  


Jonathan nodded, and pressed a button on the dashboard, and a woman’s voice began to sing quietly, as the car rolled away into the winter morning.  


*******  


All across the base at Klyuchi, alarms were blaring, and Nikolay and Kali ran through the bright corridors to find their source.  


Really, there was only one place that it could be coming from – the great chamber that housed and maintained the Gate – since, for all intents and purposes, the rest of Klyuchi was little more than a huge smokescreen for the world to see, a fake facility for weapons testing and research, protected from the eyes of the West by hundreds of miles of ocean and forest. So it was there that they ran, the two of them – a spy and an infiltrator, one bracing himself against a consuming fear and uncertainty and the other holding herself steady in the face of exhaustion and pain – and they were not prepared for what they found.  


It was nothing. Nothing was happening, and still the alarms were sounding.  


At least, that was how it initially appeared – everything was intact and standing, from the walls of the chamber to the scientists and soldiers sworn to Project Nutcracker – until one looked at the Gate.  


It was swirling and pulsing as it had never done before, the deep and unearthly reds having given way to a distinctly angry orange. Sparks – of what, Nikolay had no idea – occasionally leapt from its surface, striking the concrete floor and nevertheless burrowing down through it. And, at the centre of it all, the darkness through which the faintest outlines of the Shadow World could be seen was newly misted and shimmering, like a mirage or like the footage from a security camera.  


A crowd had gathered around the central panel of instruments, by the foot of the glass chamber housing the controls for the Gate, and Nikolay ran to join them. Kali, he noticed, was not following, but was remaining by the doorway, her shell of illusion back up, but it was hardly the time to be focusing on her.  


“–just don’t understand it,” Gorikhin was saying, as Stepanov – yes, Stepanov was here too, apparently descended from his nest – towered over him, exuding menace. At the back of the crowd lurked Brenner, but nobody paid him much heed. “Nobody’s touched the instruments recently. We’d finally achieved stability; we sent you the report. But the Dzhankoi Passageway seems to be breaking down, spontaneously unravelling, and if we can’t stop it, then it could result in total internal realignment.”  


“What the fuck does that mean?” snarled Stepanov.  


“It means, Comrade General,” said Dr Ignat’ev, diplomatically positioning himself between Stepanov and the other scientists, “that something’s gone wrong with the Gate, and in a worst-case scenario it could result in the entire base being destroyed.”  


“Then fix it,” said Stepanov, in a tone that brooked no dissent. “Immediately.”  


“It’s really not that simple –“ began Ignat’ev, but was cut off.  


“If you do not,” said Stepanov, “then I will have you killed right here and now, just like I had Alexey Stavropol’skiy killed, just like I had his predecessor killed. You follow my orders, Ignat’ev.”  


There was a moment’s silence, and then – somehow – Ignat’ev straightened up, and looked Stepanov in the eye, and said, “No.”  


“What –“  


“I do not follow your orders,” said Ignat’ev, standing tall and proud. “I am a man of science, and I work for the common good of humanity, not for the military of a single state. We all do. We will do our best to solve this problem, but not because you have ordered it. And it will take as long as it takes, unless you happen to know of a quick general method for solving the Leontiev-Hamaalin equations, Comrade General, and it will not be made any faster by your threats, so, if you please, back off and allow us to do our work.”  


A hush fell across the circle of people, scientists and soldiers, all waiting to see what would happen, and then Stepanov looked away, and gestured to his soldiers to stand back, and they did.  


“Ignat’ev,” he said, “I will not see this forgotten. You will be punished for this insubordination in due course, once the present crisis has passed.”  


Dr Ignat’ev had already turned his back on Stepanov, and was hurriedly giving directions to the other scientists present.  


“What’s the situation?” said Nikolay, once everyone had dispersed to their various tasks.  


Ignat’ev turned to look at him, as if noticing him for the first time. “The Gate’s unstable. Either the settings on the Key have been tampered with, or we got something wrong in the equations the first time through. As well as this, the instruments are going crazy, saying that there’s around thirty other miniature Gates beginning to form around the chamber, although there’s no sign of that, so presumably they’ve been tampered with as well.”  


Nikolay nodded, feeling the part of his brain responsible for handling crises lock into gear. “Anyone through the other side at the moment, in the Shadow World?”  


“Colonel Ozerov and a small operational team, on a long mission,” said Ignat’ev. “Out of reach of communication, but presumably safe from immediate harm.”  


“Understood,” said Nikolay. “Estimated time until the Gate collapses?”  


“Three minutes,” said Ignat’ev. “Unless we can fix the Key, for which we need these equations solved.” He gestured to where Gorikhin and three others were typing furiously on keyboards.  


“Anything I can do?” asked Nikolay.  


Ignat’ev shook his head.  


And it was strange, how time seemed to unravel in the face of this simple fact. All around him, people were running – soldiers to their posts and bunkers, and Gorikhin with a hastily scrawled-on piece of paper to Ignat’ev, and Brenner’s bodyguards to the edge of the Gate, waved there by Stepanov, whilst Brenner joined the throng of scientists around the foot of the glass chamber, and Kali to the edge of the crowd as well – and Nikolay Andreyevich Palenko stood, motionless, at the centre of everything, the axis upon which the room turned, for he had no idea what to do.  


And everything played out in a strange kind of slow motion, as if events were advancing not smoothly, but as a set of discrete actions, and he found himself unable to move except in these intervals, and a part of him was wondering if this was how time passed when an interdimensional portal was on the verge of implosion, or whether this was just what the imminent threat of death did to a mind. And it went like this:  


The Gate, now yellow and hissing with sparks, began to inexorably dilate –  


–and Brenner presented himself before Ignat’ev, asking a question, and it was met with a distracted nod –  


–and Ignat’ev seized the paper from Gorikhin’s outstretched hands, and his eyes widened with comprehension and triumph –  


–and there was a taste of metal in the air, like the feeling of an approaching storm –  


–and Kali, still looking like Vosemov, sank to her knees and clutched at her head in some kind of anguish–  


–and Gorikhin lunged across to the panel of instruments, and began to type, whilst Ignat’ev pulled himself up the ladder to the glass chamber with the energy of a much younger man –  


–and Brenner, who was already in the glass chamber, helped him up, and the two men began to work, rewiring the panel and turning dials and entering Gorikhin’s numbers into the Key –  


–and Stepanov was staring on the whole scene with an expression of cold fury and relief at the same time –  


–and Nikolay realised.  


The last piece clicked into place in his head. He hadn’t been aware that he had been trying to solve the puzzle, that he had been doing anything apart from asking pointless questions and standing in the midst of everything, but evidently he had. There were just a few very simple, and apparently unrelated, facts, and one fairly solid inference, and everything made sense from there. An ominous, terrifying, sense.  


Fact One: the Flower-Shark in the basement had no vocal organs, no apparent means of communicating with others of its kind, yet it was still as intelligent as humans if not more so.  


Inference One: considering the strange mental effects associated with the Shadow World, and the need of any conceptual mirror of humanity to have some method of communicating between its members, it was not unreasonable to think that it was telepathic.  


Fact Two: the Flower-Shark was attracted to the smell of blood, and could detect it from a long distance away.  


Fact Three: when Brenner had returned through the Gate earlier that day, he had been bleeding from a long cut along his arm, apparently for some time, yet was careful and dextrous enough to have become a practical scientist in the first place.  


Fact Four: it was perfectly possible to break a piece of complicated machinery without really knowing how it worked, or entirely how to mend it, if you just had a bit of knowledge in the right sort of direction.  


Fact Five: the majority of the Klyuchi base had gathered in the chamber at the sound of the alarm, just as he had.  


Fact Six: the Flower-Sharks possessed some kind of ability to open their own little Gates for the purposes of hunting if there was a larger one in the vicinity, like cracks spreading out across a sheet of ice – just like the miniature Gates that the instruments were showing.  


Fact Seven…  


Time returned to normal, and Nikolay cried, “Yermolay, no!”, a half-second before Martin Brenner produced a gun seemingly from nowhere, and shot Dr Yermolay Ilyich Ignat’ev twice in the head, before throwing his bleeding body from the ladder and calmly closing the door of the glass chamber behind him.  


And Nikolay would have grieved, would have cried, would have tried to avenge his murdered friend, but there was no time any more. Because, from the walls and the floor, from the deep blue Gate and from thin air itself, inhuman figures with long tapering arms and faceless heads were clawing their way into the world.  


The Flower-Sharks – thirty, maybe more – did not move as one unit, coordinated and methodical. They acted according to their own whims, each springing in a different direction, pouncing on a different person, and tearing them apart with their claws and their teeth, before moving onto another. Stepanov’s soldiers were attempting to put up a fight, to rally together and concentrate their fire on individual Flower-Sharks, but to no avail; it took several rounds of bullets to even puncture the skin of the creatures, which were in any case moving too fast to focus on effectively. And then three more, which had climbed onto the roof of the glass chamber – as Brenner sat calmly on the chair within – sprang down into the middle of the formation of soldiers, and they scattered or fell, torn to shreds by the sheer savagery of their foes, animalistic and yet disturbingly human.  


The blood was running in streams across the floor now. Once someone was dead on the concrete ground, the Flower-Sharks left them alone, moved on to their next target – for they would have all the time in the world to eat once they had finished disposing of their prey. Gorikhin was dead, his back against the instrument panel, looking almost peaceful except for the horrendous slash across his torso. Stepanov was dead, his throat opened by a single claw. Brenner’s bodyguards were dead, their bodies burning as the sparks from the edges of the Gate rained down onto their bloody forms.  


And now Kali was at Nikolay’s side, pulling him down to the floor, pressing the two of them back against the wall of the glass chamber, not looking like Vosemov any longer, but like a terrified young woman with blood pouring from her nose as she screwed her eyes shut with an expression of deep concentration, and however she was hiding them, it was working, for the Flower-Sharks did not glance in their direction as they continued their unpredictable path across the floor of the great cavernous room.  


And above it all sat Brenner, his face calm and composed as he looked down on the slaughter he had unleashed, his eyes not betraying a flicker of unease or revulsion, despite the smears of blood on the glass and the scratching claws of the hungry Flower-Sharks against the door. Nikolay looked at him, forced himself to look, so that he would not forget that expression, the look of the man who had just murdered his friend and organised the deaths of another hundred people at least. Brenner could have been watching television, or listening to a piece of music; could even have been thinking about other things entirely. He might as well have been somewhere else.  


And Kali was standing now, forcing herself to her feet, and grabbing the nearest gun from the nearest corpse, and she fired it at Brenner, pulling the trigger again and again until there were no more bullets, and Nikolay – feeling an indescribable, helpless rage come over him – joined her in this, stood, shot, yelled a wordless cry of pain. But the bullets merely deflected off the glass, which had been made to withstand greater forces than this, and Brenner turned to stare down at them.  


“Eight,” he said, amusement colouring his tone – the first emotion he had shown since Nikolay had entered the room. “How strange to see you here. This will be an appropriate way of disposing of a failed experiment, I suppose.”  


“Let me into that box,” hissed Kali through her teeth, spitting blood from her mouth and wiping it from her nose, “let me in, you coward, you murderer, and I will show you how much I have failed.”  


“Oh, Eight,” said Brenner, turning his attention away from her. “You always were blind to the bigger picture.”  


And Nikolay turned, just in time, to see another Flower-Shark springing across the chamber towards them, and he pulled Kali out of the way as it jumped through the air at them, but now their backs were against the beam of red-violet light which the Key was still firing into the unsteadily pulsing Gate, and there were no more guns, no more soldiers, nothing else to save them, as the Flower-Shark readied itself to attack again.  


The others were leaving the room now, moving into the corridors, into the rest of the base. They would keep going, Nikolay knew – keep hunting through the rest of Klyuchi until they could not smell any more blood and any more fear. Perhaps even that would not be enough. Perhaps they would go to the town, go south to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, go wherever there were humans.  


The Flower-Shark pounced at them, and again they dodged out of the way, as it landed where they had been standing, and began to stalk – slowly, relaxed – towards their flanks, and Nikolay could somehow tell that it was merely toying with them for its own amusement.  


It jumped again. They dodged again. Brenner was no longer watching them, but was staring intently at the Key, moving wires around once more.  


Kali raised one hand unsteadily, and slumped against Nikolay’s shoulder, as the spectral, shimmering image of another Flower-Shark faded into existence, on the other side of them to the real one, which tilted its head in confusion and then flared its petal-like jaws in challenge. Kali’s illusion did the same, and took two paces forwards, lifting its arms like a boxer, and the Flower-Shark jumped – not at them this time, but at the illusion – and passed straight through it, into the beam of the Key.  


The smell of burning flesh filled the air, as the headless remains of the Flower-Shark sank to the floor, and Kali’s illusion winked out of existence. But now the beam itself was flickering and oscillating from side to side, occasional tendrils of energy flying out in random directions, and the Gate was a prismatic sheen of changing colours, like oil on water, and Nikolay knew that it was about to close.  


“Come on,” he murmured to Kali through a dry throat that tasted of blood and electricity.  


“Where?” she said. Her eyes were closed now, and it was all Nikolay could do to keep her standing on her own feet.  


“Away,” said Nikolay.  


And the pair of them turned their backs on the great slaughterhouse that had been the Klyuchi base, turned their back on the hundred dead humans and the one still living, and – just as Jim Hopper had done six months earlier, on the other side of the planet – they jumped, hand in hand, into the Upside-Down, into the Shadow World, into the dark.  


*******  


They carried him into the wreck of the Lab, and set him down on the altar they had built there.  


It was dark, so dark, here at the centre of the building and the centre of the story. He was beyond the sight of the ashen sky now, which had nevertheless provided him with some kind of dull grey light, and only knew where in the building he was from memory. It had been a long time since he had been here – over a year in real time, and many chapters of his life beside that – but he had not forgotten the route to the Gate.  


There was no Gate here, of course. He had watched El close it, had defended her when she did, had stood at her side and given himself to the task at hand. And there would be nothing beneath Starcourt either, for Joyce had closed that and he had defended her too, and had died for her.  


But, at the very least, there was some kind of machinery or electronics or something, a small black box that looked half-familiar from his last trip here, set innocuously against the wall and pointing in the direction of the closed Gate, perhaps twenty metres from the altar, and that fact was all that he was holding onto.  


They gathered before him. His stretcher-bearers: Billy and Barb, Mike and Will, the dead children and the ones he had let down. And then, alongside them, the other children as well: Dustin and Lucas and Max, Nancy and Jonathan and Steve. And directly in front of him, the two women who had tried to save him, the ones he had protected and defended and died for, after he had allowed the black hole inside him to tear them apart in some kind of gratitude; El and Joyce.  


And more. His parents were there too, lurking in the shadows just as they had lurked around the edges of his life for too long. Diane, and Sarah too, of course, holding hands and dressed in black veils. His comrades from Vietnam. Murray, Alexey, Lonnie, the Wheelers, Scott Clarke, Terry and Becky Ives, Owens, poor Benny, Powell and Callahan and Flo and who knew how many more beyond them, steadily becoming clearer as his weak eyes adjusted to the darkness. The room was full of people, almost shoulder to shoulder, and yet he was alone, for it was impossible to mistake that feeling of lying in the middle of an empty space.  


“Dearly beloved,” said Bob Newby, who wore a simple black tunic and a sad smile, “we are gathered here today to celebrate the life and death of James Franklin Hopper, who lived and died here in the town of Hawkins.”  


“I’m not dead,” croaked Hopper, his voice weak and unsteady, but nobody paid him any heed.  


“In his life, he failed at each and every task he set for himself,” continued Diane, or perhaps it was Sarah, or maybe both; their voices sounded so similar now, here in this place. “And with his death, they have come to an end.”  


He tried to shake his head, but could not, for there was only enough energy left for a single sprint to the machine, and no more beyond that.  


“He did not protect the children of this town,” said Will Byers, as Max nodded by his side.  


“Nor did he protect the children of this laboratory,” added Mike, and the Ives sisters clasped their hands together in sympathy.  


“He bullied the weak, and protected the strong,” said Owens. “And yet he did not follow the orders he was given when there was something else he felt like doing. He was a law unto himself, and a bad one at that.”  


“When he was supposed to serve the town of Hawkins, he merely drank and buried his emotions with chemicals,” said Flo. “And when he could not do that any longer, he chose to break the law a hundred times rather than do his job.”  


_One sprint. Twenty metres. That was all he needed._  


“He returned from the war as a broken man,” said Murray, his tone caustic and yet somehow uninvolved, flat with contempt. “And then proceeded to break those around him, to make black holes in their hearts as well to mirror his own, to fill them with the soldier’s disease known as anger.”  


“He adopted a child he could not care for,” said Nancy and Jonathan, their voices somehow twining together like strands of the creeping plants outside. “Not out of love, but out of shame. He kept her as a prisoner for a year, and praised himself for his humanity, his nobility, while she withered and calcified.”  


“He sought the love of a woman,” said Joyce, “who did not love him in return, and when her partner was killed by the things he was supposed to protect against, he demanded that she turn to him in solace. And she began to, but slowly, too slowly, so he tried to control her, to prevent her from seeing other people, while ignoring her and pushing her aside, and finally he abandoned her, chose the path of a martyr without any consultation. He died for her without asking if she wanted that, and told himself that he was a good man for doing so. He treated the people around him as empty shells, and the women most of all.”  


He closed his eyes and bit his tongue and tried to contain the scream arising within him, because he could not allow himself to give in to that, because then he would never have stopped.  


“He failed,” said Hargrove.  


“He lost,” said Bob.  


“He lied,” whispered El, and there was silence.  


And there it was, the final reserve of energy, the last few drops of petrol left in the tank. He pushed himself up, sitting, opening his eyes to the congregation of all the people he had ever known, standing there in that dark laboratory room, and shook his head (for there were no words that seemed sufficient), and slid gracelessly from the altar to stand beside it.  


“I’m not dead,” he said again, for it was somehow all that seemed to matter right now. “I’m still alive. And I haven’t failed yet. I _haven’t_. There’s still time.”  


The words echoed oddly in the great empty chamber, and nobody replied. They merely stood there, staring, their eyes so sad and betrayed and vindictive and satisfied and mournful and empty.  


“I can still have time,” he whispered again, but he was the only person that heard it, and it did not seem to fill him with the strength he hoped it might.  


And he ran, staggering, shambling, almost throwing himself across the room, one sprint, twenty metres, to the black box with its wires and its dead lights, and he pressed the single button that sat proudly on its surface.  


And nothing happened.  


No Gate opened before him. No lights flickered into life. Nothing changed.  


He pressed it again, and nothing continued to happen. The figures, now a hundred, maybe more, just stared down at him, at the place that he lay on the cold black floor.  


His numbing fingers scrabbled at the side of the box, and found a seam, and pulled despite the pain, and the side swung open, to reveal an entirely empty box.  


“Look on the side,” said somebody. He wasn’t sure who it was.  


He turned the box, pushing it with his forearms, desperately trying to keep his eyes open, and read the writing there.  


_JAMES HOPPER_ , it said.  


“It’s empty, you see,” said Joyce, who was standing beside him now. “It’s empty, and it doesn’t work.”  


“It doesn’t save you,” said El.  


“And it’s dead,” said somebody else, and Hopper wasn’t sure, but he thought that the voice might possibly have been his own, and Joyce and El were nodding, the whole congregation was nodding sadly and smiling in encouragement.  


And, in that moment, he came to believe it, to believe all of them, that they were right about everything, and most of all about his death. He could not face the prospect that this was how life worked.  


“So, is that it?” he muttered. His voice was little more than a breath by now. “What comes next?”  


“Oh, nothing,” said Joyce. “There’s nothing beyond this, Hop. This is how it goes forever now. That was your life, and this is how it ends.”  


And Jim Hopper surrendered, finally and completely, for there was nothing left to support him – not the memories of his loved ones, nor the possibility of escape; not the pleasure of routine survival, nor even the continued functioning of his body. He just lay there, motionless and hopeless, on the cold floor of the replica of a torture chamber in another dimension, alone, in the dark.  


And the darkness began to move.  


It rippled, and then began to sweep itself across the floor of the chamber, like a tablecloth being picked up from the centre, and at the sides of the room, a slightly brighter red-and-grey light began to advance. And wherever this light touched the standing figures – or, no, wherever the darkness was no longer upon them – they faded away, as though they had merely been a strange and persistent dream. And still the darkness moved, now like a wave, a tide, contracting even as it began to rise and tower over him, and as the final figures of Joyce and El faded away, it formed itself into a coherent shape.  


There, in that great pit, in the wreck of the Lab, the Mind Flayer stood over him and surrounded him, just as it had been surrounding him for six months now, filling his vision and his lungs and shaping figures to drive him over the edge. Its legs were like the curving pillars of a temple, and its body was like smoke and bitterness, and its face was like nothing that human language or human thought was capable of comprehending or describing. And it stared down at him, and he could feel it, could taste the shape of its thoughts and its plans, and every one of them tasted like slow and methodical malice.  


And he screamed, although there was nobody to hear him, as it poured into him, as the Mind Flayer curled its mind around his own and infiltrated its tendrils into every last vein and artery and capillary of his body, swept its shadows along each nerve and filled his organs with dead smoke. And he felt his memories, calmly and without much fanfare, being shut down, one by one, as Jim Hopper was erased piece by piece, a reed in a hurricane, a speck of oil in a volcano, a single human being in the face of something almost infinitely vaster and more complex, an idea given life and independence, a fragment of the infinite, a thing without comparison.  


And when it was over, after seconds or possibly days, _it_ stood, and examined its new limbs with dead fascination, and turned its eyes to the wild skies, and smiled.  


For now it could begin.  


_**END OF PART ONE** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah. This is where things really start to get interesting...
> 
> Please leave comments - I'd really love to hear what people think of this chapter, and of the whole story so far!


	8. Everybody Wants To Rule The World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back from the hiatus! Welcome to Part Two of Empty Spaces...

_****_

_**PART TWO: THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY** _

**Monday 6th January, 1986:**  


The sun was high above them in the sky by the time that the old, battered car finally made it back to Hawkins, and the day was bright and cold in that deceptive midwinter way. They had been silent for a few hours now, out of exhaustion more than anything else; every so often, Nancy or Jonathan would switch tapes, generally accompanied with a rehearsed and friendly bickering about the quality of Jonathan’s music, but this was more or less the only activity as the car wound its way across the wide expanses to the south of the Great Lakes, through flat rolling hills and fields and rusting factory towns. Jasna drank in the scenery with fascinated eyes – for she had never left the immediate environs of Washington before in her life, with the exception of the occasional family holiday to New York for business reasons – but it was, for the most part, just a backdrop to the slow and stately march of her thoughts.  


She was out. Finally, she was out. She was free.  


Jasna Konstanjević had never exactly allowed herself to dream about leaving home before. Part of this was the unspoken, consciously irrational fear that somehow her parents would find out, would come to know about her ambitions and would castigate her as a terrible and irresponsible daughter; another part was a sporadic attachment to a few of the parts of her old life (although after George had died, this had mostly fallen by the wayside). But, as she was coming to realise, the main reason she had never considered this in any great detail before now, before that cold and endless moment when she had seen her parents’ names in the files at Longbow House, was a lot simpler than any of that. It was the same reason that dogs and cats didn’t dream of the Asian steppes or the great flatlands of the Arabian Peninsula. Their little homes were all they’d ever known.  


And now she was out in the wilderness (by which she meant Indiana); the great-great-granddaughter of wildcats stranded in a wholly unfamiliar place. She had no clothes but the ones she was wearing; no shoes but the ones on her feet; absolutely nothing in the way of a toothbrush whatsoever. There was certainly no chance that she would be able to return any time soon; the Konstanjević family was not particularly prone to forgetting, let along forgiving.  


“Cashpoint,” she said, suddenly, into the silence between tracks on the tape.  


Nancy jumped slightly, as though she had been falling asleep. “What?”  


“Sorry,” said Jasna. “I mean, can we go to a cashpoint? I’ve got a horrible feeling that my parents are going to cancel my credit card when they realise that I’ve still got it.”  


“I’ll take you there later,” said Nancy. “Right now, we need to find somewhere for you to stay in Hawkins.”  


“Where are you thinking?” said Jasna. “I mean, is there somewhere around here you know that’s particularly suitable as a place for fugitives and runaways to hide from their parents and the government?”  


She was not prepared for Nancy and Jonathan to glance at each other, and then burst out laughing.  


“It’s normally cleaner,” said Nancy, as the three of them stared down the steps into the basement of the Wheeler house.  


Jonathan shook his head. “That isn’t actually true.”  


Jasna said nothing, looking at the room. It was everything her old apartment had not been; the walls were adorned with posters rather than art, and the table in the centre was far more plastic than mahogany. But these were surface details; the real difference was in the fact that the room felt like it belonged to a home, rather than to the picture of one. It felt lived-in, real, authentic.  


“It’s perfect,” she said, softly. “Thank you – you didn’t have to –“  


“Well, we were obviously going to,” said Nancy. “So this room is yours, if you want it.”  


“After all,” said Jonathan, “we may have played a small part in causing you to leave home.”  


Behind them, there was the sound of a door opening, and Jasna turned to see another person standing behind them, a tall boy in his early teens with dark hair and dark circles under his eyes.  


“Hey, Nancy,” he said. “Hey, Jonathan. Hey, person. What’s going on?”  


“Hey, Mike,” said Nancy. “This is Jasna. She’s run away from home after finding out that her parents were complicit in government atrocities after we broke into a secret base in Washington together, and now we’re protecting her from any reprisals. What’s up with you?”  


“Not much,” said Mike. “Me and Max got captured by the army after our bus was attacked by some creature, got interrogated but gave them false information, and then got rescued by Steve and Robin in exchange for fake Russian documents. Is she moving in?”  


“Yeah, she is,” said Nancy. “Into the basement.”  


A series of looks passed between the Wheeler siblings, before Mike nodded reluctantly, and turned to Jasna.  


“I’ll move some of my stuff out the way,” he said. “But the blanket fort stays. If the government comes looking for you, then we’ll hide you, but if you’re keeping any secrets from us, or if you're working for our enemies, then you’re out. OK?”  


“Erm, yeah, that sounds fine –“ began Jasna uncertainly, but Nancy interrupted.  


“Mike, shut up,” she said. “You’re not the king of the basement. Jasna gets to stay, end of story. Sorry about my brother,” she added, turning to Jasna. “He’s sentimentally attached to a blanket fort and thinks he’s in charge of everyone. You’ll get used to it.”  


“How come Mrs Wheeler hasn’t come to see us?” said Jonathan. “Is she out?”  


Mike flinched slightly. “She’s still in bed, apparently. Nancy – erm – Dad’s gone. He’s walked out on us.”  


Jasna had been trying not to stare at Nancy too much throughout this conversation. She had been informed on a number of occasions in the past, by parents and by other girls at school, that this was generally considered to be somewhat offputting and strange, and had implications for her character which she did not enjoy hearing about. She had largely been unsuccessful, though, with her eyes continually wandering back towards Nancy’s face no matter how hard she tried to keep them fixed on the wall behind her, trying not to cause any trouble or stand out too much. So she did not miss Nancy’s immediate reaction to this news, news that only a week ago would have brought Jasna’s entire world crashing down around her had she been in that same position.  


“OK, cool,” Nancy said, blinking in surprise and nodding slightly, but her expression remaining otherwise unchanged. “Well, hopefully she won’t mind someone else moving in, then. I’ll talk to her later. Jonathan, are you staying, or do you need to head back to Winterton?”  


“Nance,” began Jonathan, cautiously, but Nancy shook her head.  


“I heard him,” she said. “I’ll deal with it later. I’m not sure whether we can trust the phones at the moment – Owens, or this guy he’s fighting against, have probably got a wiretap on us – so if you need to tell your family where you are, then you can use Mike’s radio thing –“  


“I’ll stay,” said Jonathan. “For tonight. I can’t face another seven hours of driving today.” His voice was soft, and Jasna could easily read his real reason for staying between the lines, could hear his concern, but Nancy did not appear to notice it.  


“Sounds good,” she said. “Mike, we’re going to go shopping to buy Jasna some actual possessions; clean up the basement a bit when we’re gone.”  


Mike rolled his eyes and sketched a bow.  


“I’m going to go and get changed,” Nancy continued, “and I think I’ve got some of your old clothes as well, Jonathan, if you want to do the same. Jasna, if you want to have a nap or something like that, then you can use my bed, or the couch down in the basement, if you’d prefer to get settled in.”  


Jasna, unsuccessfully trying to follow this whole line of conversation and stifling a yawn, merely nodded, and tiptoed down the stairs as Nancy and Jonathan headed elsewhere, eventually sinking down onto the couch.  


She looked around. This was her new home. It had a blanket fort in the corner, and a stained and fraying carpet, and a shelf on one wall overflowing with books with dragons on the covers. The sofa was old, and slightly moth-eaten. The table was covered in homework and uneaten packets of crisps. The light was faint, and much of the room lay in some kind of shadow.  


It would do. It might not have been hers, but the old apartment never had been either, and this strange basement was already a lot more welcoming in five minutes than the other place had been in seventeen years.  


“Now what?” murmured Jasna Konstanjević into the silence, and when no reply came, she allowed her eyes to fall closed, and a peaceful sleep to take her.  


*******

**Wednesday 8th January, 1986:**  


“How is he?” asked El, the first time they were all together again after that evening in the forest and the rain.  


Maria shrugged slightly, and shuffled deeper into the old armchair in the living-room of the Byers house. “Awake, and talking, but he still needs a whole bunch of surgery, apparently. Internal bleeding and stuff, as well as the hypothermia.”  


Will nodded in sympathy, but in truth, he had no idea what might have happened to Mr Glenny, what those things – the Vestige, they had called themselves at one point – would have done to him if they had not decided to use him as bait in a trap instead. He had been trying for a few days now not to think too hard about that, and mostly failing.  


“Does he remember any of it?” asked Josh. “I mean, presumably he’s not exactly sharing it all with the doctors, but do you know if he…“  


Maria shook her head. “Only flashes, by the sounds of it. They hit his head pretty hard, so he’s chalking it all up to hallucinations or fever dreams or whatever, and I didn’t feel like correcting him.”  


“I mean,” said Josh, “what would you have told him, anyway?”  


He turned his head to meet Will’s gaze, and Will didn’t want to pull away from his stare – partially because Josh’s eyes were oddly interesting in their angles and curves and shades of brown, but also because he knew what this meant.  


He sighed.  


“Fine,” he said. “I guess we owe you some exposition, after all that.”  


El nodded ruefully.  


“Shall we start with your story, or mine?” said Will to her.  


She tilted her head, considering the question, then said, “Yours. More salient.” She said the last word in the tone of someone who had learnt it three weeks earlier and was still looking for chances to use it.  


“OK,” said Will, leaning forwards. “I know that this is going to sound a bit crazy, but I promise you it’s all true. Every last part.”  


“We’re going to believe you,” said Josh. “Whatever you tell us. It can’t make much less sense than how things seem right now.”  


Will, despite himself, despite the memories, smiled. “So, back in 1983, when I still lived in Hawkins, I was playing D&D with my friends one night…”  


“…and then we moved here,” finished El. “Three months after Starcourt.”  


For several seconds, nobody said anything, and then both Josh and Maria started talking at once.  


“Why did –“  


“What about –“  


They stopped, looked at each other, and by some unspoken agreement Maria was the one who began again.  


“Why did you have to leave?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense – Hawkins was where all your friends were, and if it came back…”  


“Mom couldn’t be there any more,” explained Will. “The memories, the danger, everything. She’d lost Bob, and then lost Hopper, and it could have been anyone else next time.”  


Maria shook her head, seeming dissatisfied by something, but Josh was the one who spoke.  


“So,” he began, “you two aren’t actually related?”  


Will and El shook their heads in unison. Josh narrowed his eyes, suspiciously.  


“Yeah, that’s the bit that I’m having trouble with here,” he continued. “Well, you know, that and the _existence of interdimensional demon gods –_ "  


He met Will’s eyes again, and fell quiet, apologetically.  


“What about your sister, then, El?” said Maria. “What happened to her?”  


“Kali?”  


“Yeah. Just seems a bit weird that that plot thread didn’t come up last year. Oh, and what about Billy Hargrove?”  


Will blinked in confusion. “What about him?”  


“Well,” said Maria, “was that it? Or is he still alive?”  


“No,” said Will, “he’s obviously very dead. He was possessed, and then stabbed several times by a flesh demon, and then all the possessed people exploded anyway. Why on earth would he have survived?”  


“He just seemed like he should have had a bigger role in the story,” muttered Maria. “Look, I just don’t really like the ending. That’s all.”  


“But it’s not,” said El. “That’s the point. It wasn’t. Not the end.”  


Will nodded alongside her. “We all knew it, I think. It’s not nearly over yet.”  


“Well, so it would appear,” said Josh. “There’s people hunting us down – well, hunting you two down, sorry, guys – here in Winterton now, and they could possess anyone at any point to get to us. Nowhere is safe.”  


“Safe here,” said El. “A bit. They’re scared of Joyce.”  


“Yeah, fair enough, I think I am too,” said Maria. “But you’ve got to leave the house to go to school, and Joyce has to work. And, you know, they might try and possess us, me and Josh, since we can get close to you.”  


“That’s…actually a good point,” said Will, feeling a sinking feeling in his stomach. “I think I’ll be able to tell when one of them is near, but we can’t count on it, and El doesn’t have that ability.”  


“What, your magic neck?” said Josh.  


Will turned to look at him. “Please stop calling it that.”  


Josh looked away, his mouth set firmly in a straight line.  


“We need proof,” said El. “A way to prove that you’re not one of them.”  


“Fire?” said Maria. “It can’t handle fire, so can we work with this?”  


“Expand on that?”  


“We, erm…burn ourselves…slightly…whenever we meet up with you…” She trailed off, seeing everyone’s eyes on her, and looked down at the floor.  


“Memories,” said Will. “When I was…when he got me, two years ago, I started to forget things. Names of people I knew, details. Maybe we should just ask each other security questions every time we meet.”  


Josh was nodding. “That would work. Obviously, only if we already know the right answers. I mean, I could just make anything up for my favourite colour, and you wouldn’t know.”  


“Alright,” said Will, resolve in his tone. “How about this, then. We each make a list of obscure facts about ourselves. Fill a whole sheet of paper with this, copy it onto another two. We each give everyone else our lists, but don’t keep it ourselves, so that the Vestige can’t find out the right answers if it possesses us. Then, whenever we see each other, we test each other on these, and run if the other person doesn’t know.”  


El nodded, satisfied. “Homework. Make these lists tonight, and meet up tomorrow.”  


Later, after Josh and Maria had left, promising to walk as far home as they could together, El turned to Will, smiling, and said, “Leadership. Like Mike.”  


Will stiffened, and deliberately did not look at her, as he said, “I’m not trying to be like Mike.”  


El tilted her head in curiosity. “It’s a good thing.”  


“Yeah,” said Will, trying to contain the sudden and unexpected upwelling of emotions and thoughts. “Maybe for you. Not for me.”  


And with that, he rose to his feet, and walked calmly – did not storm, did not run – out of the room.  


*******

**Monday 13th January, 1986:**  


“Hey, Wheeler,” came an unpleasantly familiar voice, and Mike froze in place by his locker, before straightening up again and deliberately returning to the task of moving books into his bag.  


“Hey, Troy,” he sighed, when it was clear that the encounter could not be avoided. “What do you want?”  


Troy chuckled. His laughter had always reminded Mike of a documentary he had once seen about jackals. “Why so unfriendly, Mikey? Did your boyfriend break up with you over the holidays?”  


Mike shook his head. “Santa didn’t bring you any new insults for Christmas, then? These ones are showing their age.”  


Troy grinned, but only with his mouth.  


“What the fuck do you want, Walsh?” said Mike.  


“Oh, I just wanted to come and say hello, and then you started to get all –“  


“No,” said Mike, interrupting Troy for the first time in several years.  


“I beg your pardon, Wheeler? Did you just say ‘no’ to me?”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, nodding. “Said it quite loud, actually, so that you’d hear.”  


There was a strange glint in Troy’s eyes. He had not stopped smiling, but there was not a person alive who would have mistaken it for a friendly or happy expression.  


“Look, here’s the thing,” Mike continued. He did not feel angry or scared, for a change; he just felt tired. “You’ve been playing this stupid game for four, five years now, and I’ll be honest, it’s getting a bit old. OK, brilliant, you can push me into things and trip me up, and call me one of three different names. Fucking congratulations. But I’ve got bigger things to deal with these days, so, quite frankly, I don’t really care any more. So just fuck off and find a new hobby.”  


And he turned his back on Troy, closed the locker, began to leave.  


“You’ve got some fucking nerve, Wheeler,” said Troy, his voice low and dangerous. “And you’d better not think that this is over.”  


“Hooray,” sighed Mike, and walked away.  


The others were already in the science classroom by the time he arrived, and were sitting on desks talking to each other.  


“Hey, Mike,” said Dustin, the first to notice him. “So nice of you to join us.”  


“Yeah, thanks, Dustin,” said Mike, rolling his eyes. “Take it up with Troy if you’re that cross about me being late.”  


“Just the usual?” asked Lucas, who was sitting on a desk near the back of the room, Max leaning against him.  


Mike nodded. “Nothing interesting. Shall we get started?”  


The others nodded.  


“I call to order this meeting of the Hawkins High School AV Club,” said Mike, his voice flat as he glared at Dustin, “and, once again, would like to object strongly to the constitutional rule that I have to say those words at the start of each session. Lucas, get the door.”  


The door was duly closed and locked.  


“Important business, then,” continued Mike. “The official debriefing from our respective experiences two weekends ago.”  


“Debriefing,” repeated Max, in a tone of voice which was not entirely sincere. Mike rolled his eyes again.  


“Comparing notes, then,” he said. “Dustin, Lucas, would you like to go first?”  


“Thank you, Mr President,” said Dustin, sliding off the desk to his feet. “We’ve already given you the brief summary of what happened, but I’ll go through it again in three phases: our journey through the woods; our encounter with the creature; and our voyage home with Murray. Before that, though, I think there’s one important matter that we need to consider.”  


He picked up a piece of chalk, and began to sketch a strange picture on the blackboard, a four-legged creature with a flower-petal mouth. Judging by the look on Lucas’s face, they had not prepared this presentation jointly.  


“The creature that attacked the bus,” said Dustin. “The creature that hunted and killed the soldiers that were searching for us, and almost ate us as well. Does anyone have a suggestion for which D&D monster to name it after?”  


Mike, in his capacity as President, was unable to keep order in the shouting match that ensued, and it was a few minutes before the four of them had settled down again, and could get back to business.  


An hour later, the blackboard was full, and the four of them were staring at it uneasily.  


“OK,” said Max, breaking the silence. “What do we do with all of this?”  


Dustin nodded sagely. “We’ve compiled all of our data on the present crisis. Now we need to work out our next course of action.”  


“What course of action?” said Max. “Like, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Dusty-bun, but the creature –“  


“The Manticore,” interjected Dustin.  


“Dustin, I swear to God, I will punch you in the face –“  


“– the creature,” continued Max, louder, as if nobody else had spoken, “is a few hundred miles away, and not actually our problem.”  


“And we don’t really have the manpower to storm Beeching’s base,” continued Lucas, “even if there was any conceivable reason why we would want anything more to do with him after he kidnapped and interrogated those two.”  


“Yeah, face it, Dustin,” said Mike. “There’s nothing we can really do right now.”  


The room fell silent. Dustin nodded slightly, and then picked up the chalk again.  


“OK,” he said. “Here’s what we can do. Work out what our big questions are. The unknowns.”  


Mike, slowly, nodded. “Yes. That way, we might be able to see what’s actually going on.”  


“I’ll start,” said Dustin. On the blackboard, he wrote, _1) Why did the Creature attack the bus?_  


Lucas gestured for Dustin to pass him the chalk, and wrote, _2) Why did Beeching kidnap M &M?_  


Mike nodded, lost in thought. “Both good questions – let me –“  


He took the chalk, and wrote, _3) What does this have to do with the events in Winterton? Why did they happen at the same time?_  


“On that note,” said Lucas, “when can we talk to El and Will about this? Mike, I know you’ve been calling El and acting as a middleman, but we should probably have some kind of group conversation on this matter.”  


Mike gritted his teeth. “I’ve been trying to say this as well, but either they’re busy or we are. Hopefully this weekend, or –“  


There was the sound of a key turning in the lock, and – as the four of them scrambled to their feet towards the blackboard – Mr Clarke entered, looking somewhat tired and surprised to see them there.  


“Hi, guys,” he said. “I didn’t realise you were having an AV Club meeting today?”  


“We moved it, sir,” said Dustin quickly. “I have to see a whole bunch of dentists later this week. We can clear up the classroom, if you like – erase the blackboard, erm –“  


Mr Clarke blinked and turned his attention to the blackboard, which was exactly what Dustin had apparently been hoping to avoid. Mike’s heart sank.  


“What’s all of this, then?” he asked the room.  


“D&D,” said Lucas, but trailed off, evidently hoping that someone else would pick up the thread.  


“Where you’re all working together on the plot?” said Mr Clarke, curiously. “It’s been a few years since I last played, of course, but won’t that spoil the mystery a bit?”  


“It’s not a campaign, sir,” said Mike, wondering how he was going to finish his sentence. “It’s, erm – it’s, it’s, a performance. We’re writing it together.”  


“Like a film?”  


“Yeah,” said Max, nodding hurriedly. “Or, like, erm, an audio drama. So we don’t have to dress up.”  


“Yes,” said Mr Clarke, in a tone of consideration, “I imagine this large monster might be a bit difficult to get hold of for filming as well.”  


“It’s a Manticore,” said Dustin. Lucas kicked him.  


Mr Clarke was still staring at the blackboard, but his attention seemed to be somewhere else entirely. Then, as if nothing had happened, he blinked and shook his head, and smiled at the group.  


“I look forward to listening to it when it comes out,” he said. “Let me know what you need for the recording equipment. And don’t worry about tidying the room – I’ve got a few things to get done first.”  


The four of them filed out of the room, nodding their goodbyes to Mr Clarke as they left.  


“An audio drama?” whispered Lucas.  


Mike nodded gloomily. “I know. Now we have to write one as well as solving this whole thing.”  


“Literally nobody else was thinking that,” said Max. “And I’m sorry – I didn’t hear you coming up with anything better, Lucas –“  


“Well, thank god that you two are better at lying to soldiers than you are to Mr Clarke,” muttered Dustin. “Otherwise you’d still be in that base right now.”  


They walked through reception and through the front doors of the school, out into the parking lot, still bickering between themselves, casting their eyes around for anyone that might give them a lift home, and at the back of their minds keeping an eye out for any kind of danger.  


They did not notice the lights of Hawkins High – just once, just for a second – flicker behind them.  


*******

**Date unclear:**  


The leaden darkness of midday had given way to the darkness of early evening, which was no brighter and somewhat more threatening. Kali was used to it by now.  


Maybe a week, maybe two. In the days that had followed their escape – that heart-stopping moment when she and the Ukrainian spy had jumped together through the closing Gate, mere seconds before it snapped shut and the ground shuddered with suppressed energy from its closure – she had drifted in and out of consciousness for several days, trying to recover her strength and her powers. The bitter-tasting air here did not make it easy, and nor did the deep, biting cold of a sunless world.  


Nikolay had been in charge of protecting them both in that time, but the Flower-Sharks had not returned. Perhaps they were stranded in the real world now, with the closing of the Gate rendering them unable to create their own miniature replicas and barring their journey home. Or perhaps, after they had torn through the military base, they had made their way to the surface, and had caught the scent of fresh food on the wind, and had begun to swarm southwards towards human civilisation.  


There was no way of knowing, because there was no way back. Nikolay had searched in vain, and in the past few days, she had finally found the strength to join him in his patrols, only to see the truth for herself: there were no other Gates. The Russians had constructed theirs at the foot of the enormous crater, and the Flower-Sharks had opened their own ones around it, and now all of them were gone, dissolved, as if they had never existed in the first place.  


Nikolay was returning now, carrying another handful of military rations scavenged from the trucks and tanks which had been sent through before the fall of Klyuchi, and Kali pulled herself to her feet to receive him.  


“This is the last of it,” said the spy, by way of greeting. Like her, his face and hair were stained with the strange ashlike substance which drifted through the air, and the hints of a beard were beginning to show on his thin face. “Brings our store up to four weeks each; maybe five, if we’re careful and work out a good way to store it once it’s cooked. But that’s all we’re getting.”  


Kali said nothing. Four weeks was both longer than her brain was entirely capable of conceptualising her continued existence for, considering the hostility of the landscape around her, and a distressingly low number.  


“Two choices,” she eventually said. Her voice was hoarse and dry; neither of them entirely trusted the water they had found, and so had limited their intake to a few gulps every day. “Either we stay here waiting for help, or we leave. Try and find some other food.”  


“Like the song,” said Nikolay, half-smiling. “Should we stay, or should we go?”  


Kali rolled her eyes. “This whole place is a mirror of our world, right?”  


“I wasn’t one of the scientists,” said Nikolay, “but that’s how it looks, yes. Everything in our world has its counterpart here, but darker, sharper. More twisted.”  


“So,” continued Kali, “we walk to the nearest town. Find the mirror-food they’ve got there. I can cope with eating evil bread.”  


Nikolay lowered himself to a sitting position, and Kali followed suit. “Problem.”  


“What?”  


“The Flower-Sharks. My friend, Yermolay, he theorised – and obviously, we have no way of knowing if this is true or not – he thought that they were the equivalents of humanity here in the Shadow World.”  


Kali tried her best not to roll her eyes again at the term ‘Shadow World’, which had clearly been invented by a bunch of melodramatic Russian nerds. “So?”  


“So,” said Nikolay, “it wouldn’t surprise me if the town were full of them. We wouldn’t last five minutes.”  


Kali nodded slowly. Her powers were slowly returning – she had been practicing every day since she had been able to stand again – but they would not be able to sustain themselves for any considerable length of time.  


“Well,” she replied, “I don’t think much of the first option, either. We can’t just wait here for someone to open the magic portal again. Everyone’s dead.”  


Nikolay slumped slightly lower, and – just for a moment – he looked around a decade older than he was. “Yes. You’re right. It took them long enough to build the Gate in the first place, and all of the scientists – Yermolay, Boris, Mintimer, everyone – well, for all I know, there’s nobody left in the Soviet Union with the theoretical knowledge to construct one. Brenner killed them all.”  


“Believe me,” said Kali, softly, dangerously, “I know the feeling.”  


“So we leave,” continued Nikolay. “We head north, try and find Ozerov’s team. They were sent on a long-range scouting mission here a day before the base fell; god knows when they were supposed to be returning here, but we should be able to follow where they went in one of those tanks. See if we can share our resources, cooperate –“ Kali may have just been imagining it, but Nikolay’s face seemed to twist slightly with unease at the thought of working with Ozerov – “and work out what to do next.”  


Kali leaned forwards, pushing her knotted hair out of her eyes. “I’ve got a different suggestion.”  


“Let’s hear it,” said Nikolay.  


“Your Russian friend,” she said, “Ozerov – he’s not going to be able to make a portal. Nobody here can. The only place that might have a way out is America.”  


Nikolay had been staring at the ground in thought, but lifted his head now, his eyebrows furrowed. “The American programme failed, a year or two ago.”  


“Said the Soviet propaganda machine,” replied Kali. “We don’t know what’s going on there these days. And there’s a small chance that, even if there’s no actual portal, there’s somebody over there who can make one for us.”  


“Oh?” said Nikolay. “Do you know a lot of rogue interdimensional engineers?”  


“Just one,” said Kali, allowing herself to smile slightly. “My sister. Number Eleven. Jane. She had something to do with the original portal in Hawkins; she told me bits and pieces of information when we met in Chicago a year later, and I’ve pieced a couple of other things together since. If there’s any way out of this hellscape, then it’s her.”  


Nikolay blinked, and then tilted his head in assent. “Well, that makes just as much sense as anything else going on here. And it’s a better chance than nothing. So, what, we walk to America?”  


“If we have to,” said Kali. “But maybe your patrol will have a plane or a helicopter with them, for surveying or something.”  


“And if not,” continued Nikolay, “we drive as far north as we can; find or build a boat, cross the Bering Strait or the North Pacific, walk a couple of thousand miles south to Indiana, and cross our fingers that your sister’s ready and waiting for us.”  


Kali smiled now, and it was the first genuine smile in quite some time. “God, Brenner’s going to be surprised when he sees us again. If he thought that trapping me in another dimension was going to keep him safe, then he’s got quite the shock coming to him.”  


Nikolay smiled as well, and Kali could see it in his eyes – the same sort of fire that had been burning in hers for several years now.  


They stood. They had a long journey ahead of them.  


*******

**Friday 17th January, 1986:**  


“Robin!” the voice of her mother called again, from the bottom of the stairs. “Dinner!”  


“Coming!” shouted Robin back, but did not move just yet, turning her attention again to her reflection in the mirror. It did not look any more confident than she felt.  


She shook her head ever so slightly, and raised her head in challenge.  


“No more lies,” she whispered. “No more lies.”  


Because it was time – time to step off the tightrope once again, and to pray that there was something waiting underneath.  


The food was on the table by the time she joined her parents – a steaming shepherds’ pie, with thin and withered leaves of cabbage perched on the side of each plate in the name of health. Her mother was busying herself in pouring drinks, whilst her father was absorbed in a newspaper.  


“Put that away, Anthony,” scolded her mother. “We’ve had this conversation before.”  


Her father grimaced, and folded the paper. “Some interesting developments in the last few days. Problems in Sierra Leone, deadlock in Congress. Some row in the British government over helicopters or something. And then there’s Kamchatka.”  


“Kamchatka?” said Robin, not ungrateful for the stay of self-enforced execution.  


“It’s a peninsula in Russia, dear,” said her mother.  


Robin rolled her eyes. “Mom, I came top of the year in Geography. I know where Kamchatka is. I mean, what’s happened there?”  


“Explosion,” murmured her father, and then swallowed his mouthful of mashed potato in order to explain more fully. “There’s been a large thermonuclear blast there, in the middle of the peninsula near a town called Klyuchi. Hundreds of square miles of forest burnt to the ground.”  


“Why?”  


“Well, that’s the thing,” said her father, leaning over the table. “Nobody entirely knows. Some people say that it’s a new round of nuclear testing – back to the arms race – but the Russian government hasn’t issued a statement yet either way.”  


“I saw Karen Wheeler in Melvald’s today,” announced Mrs Buckley, which – Robin could tell – was her way of making it clear that she had no interest in talking about international politics at the dinner table. “Some new girl’s moved in with them, a lodger or a cousin or something, Karen wasn’t very clear. But do you know the real news, Anthony?”  


Mr Buckley, his mouth full, shook his head blankly. Robin scraped at the food, her stomach churning in dread and anticipation of the moment she had been preparing herself for, whenever it might arise.  


“Ted’s walked out on her,” said her mother. “Just up and left one day, apparently. Disgraceful, if you ask me, a man leaving his children like that – and someone like Karen, well, if she’s not careful, she’ll end up going the way that Joyce Byers did. Desperate, unravelling.”  


Her father twitched his mouth in assent, but said nothing else.  


“Robin,” her mother continued, “you’ve got to be careful with men. A good thirty percent of them are like that Ted Wheeler. Cowards. Not prepared to put the work in.”  


And there it was, somehow – the opportunity she had been waiting for. She tried to force herself to smile, and took a deep breath, and said, “I don’t think I’ll have that problem any time soon, Mom.”  


Her mother blinked, and then realisation seemed to dawn on her face. “Robin, dear,” she said, “I know it’s difficult in a small town like this. But you’ll meet a good man one day, I know you will.”  


Robin shook her head, biting her lip. “No, no, no. That’s not what I mean. I mean, I’m not interested in men at all. You see?”  


Her mother gave her a sympathetic smile. “Yes, dear, I know what you mean. I used to be the same, when I was younger. I was very determined that I’d never get married, that I didn’t need a man – well, it was the 1960s, you know. But then I met your father, and everything changed, and I realised I’d just been lying to myself to try and make myself feel better.”  


Her teeth were still digging into her lip, but she was hardly noticing that now. “No. Sorry. That’s still not what I’m saying. I’m not determined to stay single forever. I’d love to meet someone and settle down with them and spend my life with them. But they’re not going to be a man. I’m not attracted to men.”  


“Is this some feminism thing, Robin?” said her father, sounding honestly curious.  


“No!” said Robin. “I guess I’m not being very clear, so, erm, here it is. Clear. I’m – I’m attracted to girls, not guys. I’m not like you, Mom, Dad. I’m qu – no. Yes. No. I’m gay.”  


And, just like when she had told Steve and Dustin those months ago, it was like the air rushing in to fill a vacuum; the deafening silence and fragile stillness, the unsettled calm, as the blood rushed to her face and her breath caught in her throat, panicked by the relinquishing of the Secret. Because, in her mind, the Secret was inexorably linked with things going wrong; if she was to imagine a situation in which she was talking about it to someone, then it was most likely one where (somehow) they had found out, and she was pleading with them not to tell, not to judge her, to let her just go about her day in peace.  


The Secret had been a secret for a very long time now. And, a small part of Robin’s brain reflected while the rest of her waited in terrified judgement, she did not think she would ever be able to reveal it without the feeling of plummeting headfirst into the unknown, towards a surface that could be welcoming or lethal or anywhere in between without any way of knowing beforehand.  


Still she waited. Still she braced herself for her fate.  


And her mother and father exchanged unreadable glances, and then her mother turned back to her, that same smile on her face, and Robin silently prayed that she would just say something, anything, to break the silence and the suspense that she seemed to be the only one noticing.  


“Sweetie,” she said, “we get it. We can understand that the male population of Hawkins isn’t exactly all that appealing. But we promise, you’ll be able to find the right man one day, and then it’ll all make sense to you.”  


“I’m sorry, what?” said Robin. The air around her suddenly felt thicker, heavier, like a dream.  


“We know that you get on a lot better with girls than with boys,” her mother continued, and Robin did not even have time to tell her that this was fundamentally untrue before she began to speak again. “And we can see how you might have come to this conclusion, and I promise you, we’re not mad at you. But do just take our word for it; there are men out there who are worth being with, and one day, you’ll run into one. You’ll meet a man who is kind, and polite, and brave, and hard-working, and who stands up for what he believes, and it’ll all work out in the end.”  


Robin was shaking her head, she realised. “No. No, Mom, no. Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?”  


“Of course we have,” said her father. “We get it, Robin. You haven’t met a guy worth the time of day – and that’s understandable, because there’s a lot of them that aren’t. And you’ve decided that you must be – that – because it’s all the rage these days, all the celebrities are saying things like that, Bowie and that man from Queen and everyone else. And we do completely understand why you’re saying this now. We just don’t want you to get yourself set on this, stubborn and attached to some particular ideological cause, in case it stops you from seeing something good – someone good – when they’re right in front of you.”  


The knife and fork had fallen from Robin’s hands, and her breaths were coming short and fast now. Her parents did not seem to have noticed.  


“All the rage?” she said. “Some ideological cause? What the fuck –“  


“Language,” said her father, but she ignored him.  


“ –what the fuck are you talking about, Dad?” she continued. “You think this –“ she gestured to herself – “is fashionable? You think people want to be like me? You think _I_ want to be like me?”  


Finally, at last, they were silent, if only for the half-second that Robin allowed to take another deep breath.  


“People like me are dying, Dad,” she said. “People get killed for being gay. All the time, everywhere. Often, the people that killed them don’t get charged. People beat us up and spread rumours about us. We’re banned from getting married. We can get fired from around a thousand different jobs for saying who we are. The government doesn’t even take us seriously when there’s a disease spreading around our community, killing, burning, because we’re not proper Americans to them. We’re dying and suffering. And, what, you think that we don’t exist? You think we’re just pretending? When this is what we get?”  


“I think that you’re confused, dear,” said her mother, her voice soft and calm. “I think that most of the people that think they’re – well, you know – are confused as well. They’ve never met the right person, or they’ve got a very close friend, and they just get their wires crossed a little bit. And maybe there’s a few people out there who actually do have this condition, but it’s really not that many at all. And the celebrities, they’re so irresponsible – they say that they’re like that just for the headlines and the attention, just to sell their albums –“  


“I’m not confused,” said Robin flatly. “I know who I am. I thought you might listen to me on something like this –“  


“Look, Robin,” said her father, “you’re going to need to trust us a bit here. Because we’re older than you, and we know more about how the world works. We’ve done the whole thing – we’ve met the right person, and made a relationship work, and started a family. And it can be hard, we know it can, for you to believe that it’ll happen to you as well.”  


“But it can,” said her mother. “You don’t need to go through this whole thing – you can just –“  


“No,” said Robin.  


There was another silence.  


“No,” she repeated. “I’m not confused. I’m not pretending, or trying something new, or waiting impatiently for the right kind of guy to come along and rescue me from maidenhood. I’m gay, and I just – I just really want you to say to me that you accept that. That you believe me.”  


The silence continued, and that said more, in its own way, than a thousand words could ever hope to.  


And Robin Buckley looked at her mother, and looked at her father, and realised – quite suddenly – that she did not entirely know who these people were, that the mental model of them she had lived with for all of her life was flawed in some intangible way, and there was the sound of something breaking as she stood up. It might have been her dinner plate falling onto the kitchen floor, or it might have been her innocence, or it might have been both.  


“Fine,” she said, hearing her own voice echo in her ears. “That’s fine. I’ve put up with hatred, and judgement, and keeping the Secret for six fucking years. I can put up with this.”  


“We don’t hate you, Robin,” said her father.  


She smiled, and there was absolutely no joy in it whatsoever. “How could you? You don’t have enough respect for me to believe that there’s anything to hate.”  


And she walked out of the room, and if she walked fast enough, and clenched her fists hard enough, then she could almost pretend that there were no tears running down her face, like a mountain road after a storm.  


*******

**Sunday 19th January, 1986:**  


Silence, or something very near to it. A whisper of wind in the leafless branches of the trees, a short snatch of birdsong. And, alongside it, a faint hiss or crackle, noise not yet resolved into any real sounds.  


Dustin liked it up there.  


By all rights, Weathertop should have been a place of bad memories – memories from that endless night, six months ago, when everything had come crashing down. The chase, the hiding, the battle. And here – the place where he had sung a song to save the world, and sung it damn well if he said so himself.  


Yes, he should have hated this place. But he never could. Mike had his basement, Will his fortress (or had done once, at least). He had a silent hilltop, chilly in the breeze of late afternoon, yet bright with the light of a distant main-sequence yellow star.  


And, as the hissing sound began to shift and settle into something intelligible, the real reason for all of this returned, and began to speak.  


“Sorry about that, Dusty,” she said. “My parents needed me for something. Where were we?”  


“Nowhere in particular,” said Dustin. “Is everything alright?”  


Suzie’s voice dropped slightly. “Just the usual stuff. Claimed that they wanted my opinion on something that our neighbours had been talking about. Religious things, mostly, so, well, I just had to nod and look polite and try not to tell them that organised religion is a protection racket from an imaginary mugger.”  


Dustin chuckled into the radio slightly. “I love…your turns of phrase, Suzie.”  


“I love…them too,” said Suzie. It was their newest joke, and had been since Lucas had told Max that he loved her shoes, clearly having changed his mind about the original sentence halfway through. Lucas, Dustin presumed, was blissfully unaware that he was the subject of interstate mockery.  


“Do you think your parents were trying to…” began Dustin, before tailing off in the hopes of finding a good way of phrasing the next sentence.  


Suzie got there first. “Trying to stop us talking to each other?”  


“Erm. Yeah.”  


“Yes, probably,” she said. Her voice was still light, somehow, and anyone who was not Dustin would not have noticed that there was anything wrong beneath those tones. “They keep mentioning around the dinner table that marrying outside the church doesn’t work out for anyone. They think they’re being subtle.”  


“I’m sorry,” said Dustin. “I could always convert?”  


Suzie laughed, genuinely amused. “You?”  


“Hey, nobody there knows me,” protested Dustin. “I can go for a couple of hours without talking about the scientific method.”  


“I really don’t think you can.”  


Another easy silence crystallised into being and drifted through the air between them.  


“Dusty,” she said, eventually, “you never finished telling me that story from last week. That D&D campaign you and your friends were playing.”  


“You’re right,” said Dustin. “I got too distracted by –“  


“By telling me about insect evolution, I know. And it was very interesting indeed. But I’d love to hear how the story ends.”  


“Well,” said Dustin, scratching his neck in faint nervousness, “we haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I can take you up to where we left off. Where was I?”  


“Your chariot was attacked in the middle of the night,” said Suzie. “By some kind of creature that you didn’t see, since you all rolled dreadful Wisdom checks, apparently. What happened next?”  


So Dustin launched into the story, and told her everything – how their paladin and rogue had been captured by the soldiers of the empire, and how the bard and the ranger had been chased by the Manticore through the forests, until they were finally rescued by a weird NPC from the previous campaign, and he talked and he talked until the sun began to set, and until they descended into casual conversation about their lives.  


Beneath the words, he heard a note of frustration in Suzie’s voice, and said, “What’s wrong?”  


“I’m OK,” she said.  


“Really?”  


“Yes. Fine. Just…just annoyed that we have to be like this. So far away from each other. Only talking on the radio. I wish I could see your face. It’s just not very romantic. I know it’s silly.”  


Dustin fell silent for a rare moment, and then said, “It’s not silly, Suzie. I feel the same. And I can’t wait to see you again, one day.” He paused, considering his next words. “As for the romance, though – see it like this. We’ve both been separated by cruel fate, by distance and religion and the world; we don’t know when they’ll let us meet again. And yet, in spite of that, we both built towers and built machines to talk between ourselves, to fill the time until we reunite. Towers tall enough to reach around the curve of an entire planet. Machines precise enough to send the messages. And when we talk, we’re manipulating light itself – since this is all just electromagnetic radiation one way or another – making our machines move quicker and more dextrously than the human eye can even comprehend, to make a code of almost unimaginable complexity which crosses the sky for miles and miles before your machine decodes it and plays you the sounds of my voice. It’s like we’re weaving with rays of invisible light, stitching our words onto the fabric of the universe, onto the all-pervading electromagnetic field, and they spread out in all directions as fast as it’s possible for anything to go, all across the planet and towards the stars. When we talk, Suzie, we’re rewriting reality itself, in our own small way, and we’re rewriting it so that it carries the message that we love each other. And maybe one day other civilisations will hear the signal on other worlds, and they’ll wonder what it means, and we’re the only ones who know the truth. The only people in the whole wide universe.”  


She was silent. So was he. The stars he had mentioned were beginning to fade into view over the hilltop.  


“I know it isn’t much,” he said, “but I think there’s a bit of romance in that. In everything.”  


She said nothing for so long that Dustin began to worry that the radio link, regardless of its romantic significance, might have cut out, and then, very quietly, she spoke.  


“Dustin Henderson,” she said, “I think I’m more lucky than I have any right to be.”  


“Suzie Delamar,” he replied, “I think I could probably say the same thing.”  


*******

**Sunday 26th January, 1986:**  


Video shops, Steve Harrington had decided a long time ago, were not remotely fun places to spend one’s waking hours. The simple solution he had devised in response to this problem was to sleep whenever he found the opportunity – Keith needed to be elsewhere, but this was not too much of a problem, since he had become much more willing to delegate in the past month since receiving a ZX Spectrum for Christmas; and there needed to be a lack of customers, but that was normally true anyway. So, looking at the clock’s downturned hands, he shrugged to nobody in particular, and lowered his head down onto the desk, allowing his eyes to fall closed.  


But sleep did not take him. Not yet, at least. There were several more pressing things on his mind.  


Where was Beeching? Where were the enemies?  


This question had been haunting him, on and off, since the moment they had driven out of Ansted, probably breaking several speed limits along the way. They had been outnumbered, outgunned, and outfaced. If Beeching had wanted to, he could have shot or captured him and Robin the moment they arrived in that mountain town – or, if he had been particularly concerned about the integrity of those faked documents, at least once they had been handed over.  


And yet they were still alive, still free. The kids were able to go to school and hang out with each other in the evening without stormtroopers descending on their houses and basements. Robin could study for her finals from the comfort of a library, rather than the inside of a prison cell. He could –  


Ah. Yes. That was the other problem.  


What was he supposed to be doing?  


For the past six months, he – the only son of the great Matthew Harrington, scourge of prosecution attorneys across Indiana – had been the proud owner of a badge which read _My name is Steve! Ask me about films!_ And the sad thing was, it wasn’t even the worst thing he’d ever had to wear for work.  


No colleges had been particularly inclined to accept his meagre applications last summer. Truth be told, his heart hadn’t exactly been in it in the first place, so perhaps that was for the best. (And, he acknowledged, he wouldn’t have been much help to the damned children if he’d been elsewhere at Christmas.) But that just left an open question: if not college, then what?  


No, this could be phrased more broadly: what did he want to do with his life?  


The bell rang as the door opened, and – in a motion he’d perfected – he swung his head gracefully from the table, adjusted his hair, and spun on the chair to face the door before whoever was entering could make it past the first set of shelves, putting the question out of his mind for a moment. It was no mystery who was there, since Sinclair and Mayfield had extremely familiar voices by this point.  


“– like he hadn’t even heard him,” Lucas was saying, clearly excited about something. “So Mike tried again, and he just mumbled something about having to do a German assignment. He doesn’t even study German.”  


“What are you on about?” said Steve, as the pair of them reached the counter. “Mayfield, put that video down, we’ve had this talk. What’s going on with Mike?”  


“That was a private conversation, Steve,” said Max.  


“Everyone in Hawkins can hear what you two are talking about, all the time,” sighed Steve, leaning back in his chair again. “It’s like you don’t even realise that voices can go quieter than that. What’s happening?”  


“I was just telling Max,” said Lucas. “We were calling the others, over in Winterton – Will and El, and these two friends they’ve made – to compare notes, to go through our relative situations.”  


“What, now?” said Steve. “Like, you didn’t think that could have been helpful three weeks ago?”  


“Mike chatted to El about it,” said Max, “but apparently Will was being kind of difficult about a group conversation.”  


“So the three of us finally arranged a call today,” said Lucas. “Max couldn’t make it – her stepdad wouldn’t let her –“ his voice darkened for a moment – “but we called them, had a proper talk about everything. And then, at the end, Mike asked Will if they could talk – like, just the two of them – and Will gave some bullshit excuse, and just left.”  


“Something happened between them at Christmas,” said Max. “We don’t know what. And now Will won’t talk to Mike, or at least won’t without being super weird about it.”  


Steve rubbed his eyes. This was going to be a long night.  


Eventually, they were gone – carrying an entirely age-inappropriate horror film that Steve had been talked into allowing them, under the grounds that ‘come on, we see worse stuff than this every year in real life’ – and he could return to his depths of introspection, curling up on the desk once again and closing his eyes.  


What did he want to do with his life? When he really got down to it?  


If someone had asked him this question three years ago – and they did, all the time in school, for some reason – he might have given several answers. _Working for my dad, probably,_ would have been the safe answer, which in no way represented his actual desires, but seemed like a normal thing to say. _Major-league basketball_ would have been another popular answer, although even King Steve at the height of his reign had possessed enough self-awareness to know that he wasn’t quite that good. _Law_ , or _economics_ , or _business_ – all of these would have been good non-committal answers, none of which sounded all that bad. But he hadn’t really thought too much about it, and he’d let things slip out of his grasp, and now all of that seemed a very long way away indeed, if he even wanted to do it.  


_Babysitting a bunch of monster-fighting teenagers whilst holding down a steady career renting films to random people_ had very much not been on the list. And sure, it wasn’t all that bad. The teenagers could have been worse. The video rental wasn’t a dreadful workplace. The monsters…well, there was room for improvement there, but he wasn’t quite sure who to speak to about that.  


But forever? Was this how Steve Harrington was supposed to spend the rest of his days?  


The door opened again. Steve sprang to attention again. But it was only Robin, her hair wet with rain and her shoes covering the floor of the shop with winter mud.  


“Hey,” said Steve, confused. “What are you doing here? I thought you had a day off.”  


“Not here to work,” she said, and Steve heard it in her voice – the sound of someone trying very hard to keep themselves under control, against all the odds.  


He jumped to his feet, and slid over the countertop in a smooth motion, and took her in his arms, holding her as the tears began to fall and softly stroking her hair, and he felt her arms fasten around his back as well. They stood there for several minutes, a strange tableau in the centre of the store, until it seemed that the worst had passed.  


“Parents?” said Steve, quietly.  


He felt Robin nod against his chest. “I tried again. I know I said that I wasn’t going to, but I thought I could make them understand. I thought I’d found the right words.”  


Steve said nothing. He wasn’t sure what to say.  


“They just gave me the same bullshit again,” Robin continued. “Said that I’d change my mind. Said that I couldn’t possibly like girls. That they knew me better than I knew myself.”  


“They are enormous pieces of human-shaped shit,” said Steve, and was rewarded with a slight, sniffling, laugh. “What can I do? How can I help?”  


“It’s fine,” said Robin. “I just – just wanted to talk to someone else. To be elsewhere.”  


“You want to hang out and watch bad films?” said Steve. “Not like there’s going to be any more customers tonight.”  


Robin considered the question for a moment, then shook her head. “I need to sleep. I’ve been up since four this morning, worrying. And there’s a Spanish test tomorrow. But thanks.”  


“Well,” said Steve cautiously, “I’m presuming you don’t want to go back to yours, so –“  


“I’ll sleep in the back room,” said Robin. “There’s a couch. I can manage there.”  


“Yeah, obviously not,” said Steve. He disentangled himself from Robin, fishing into his pockets, and extracted a set of keys. “Take my car, go to mine. My parents aren’t in town this weekend. Or ever, really.”  


“Steve,” she began, but he was not having it.  


“There are actual beds there,” he said. “You’re not sleeping on a random couch in a random shop when there’s somewhere you can go. I’ll be there later, after eleven, when the shift ends. Leave the door unlocked, pick a bedroom.”  


“Won’t you need the car?”  


Steve shook his head. “I can walk. It’s fine.”  


“You don’t have to do this –“  


“Oh, fuck off, Buckley,” said Steve. “Go and get some sleep. And, you know, to be clear, the offer doesn’t expire, if you ever need somewhere to stay.”  


She blinked a couple of times, and then smiled a watery smile. “Thanks, dingus.”  


Steve twitched the corner of his mouth. She reached up and hugged him again, and then she was gone.  


Where was he?  


Ah, yes. Wondering how to spend the rest of his life.  


It was a good question. He’d talked about this with Nancy once, in the Indian summer of their relationship, not long before the second Great Monster Catastrophe and the second (and last) Nancy Wheeler Relationship Crisis. She’d said that, if people didn’t know what they wanted to do for a job, they should ask themselves what they valued, and work it out from there. So, as he closed his eyes again, head down on the countertop, knowing in his heart of hearts that he was never going to get any sleep that evening, he tried to do just that.  


The safety of his friends, obviously. That went without saying. So, maybe a cop or something?  


No. It could work – it was a good idea – but, deep down, he had a sneaking suspicion that the violence and bloodshed and terrible things would all be too much for him. He had enough trouble when that happened once a year; a whole lifetime would send him insane. In any case, Hopper had never exactly appeared to be having a particularly good time.  


What else? Fixing your mistakes, he decided; that was important to him personally, and a good general principle to live by. Indeed, helping other people to fix their mistakes. That was good too.  


So, a therapist or something? Or a life coach? No, wait, you needed qualifications for that, and college was problematic for already-covered reasons involving his exam results.  


Freedom, autonomy, but also stability and structure and being close to the people he cared about. Helping people and being there for them when they were hurt, but also having space to himself sometimes, somewhere that he could be alone. Having some kind of driving purpose, a task or a cause, but what that might be was anybody’s guess.  


The whole thing was irritatingly difficult. And, Steve reflected, that was probably why he was in a video rental store at ten in the evening.  


The door opened again. Steve became a model employee once more.  


The man who walked through was familiar, although more by name than by appearance. He had stayed away from Neil Hargrove whenever he had been faced with the option, seeing him from time to time when driving Max home from Wheeler’s (and, yes, this should not have been his job whatsoever, but Dustin was very persistent) or around town, but never speaking to him.  


He was a relatively tall man, and seemed taller, looming threateningly over the video shelves and blocking the light from the streetlamps outside. His hair was close-cropped, and he sported a thin moustache, which graced the top of an expression which could be politely described as ‘unsmiling’.  


“Good evening, sir,” said Steve, at a loss for words and therefore resorting to Keith’s standard patter. “Welcome to Family Video. What films might you be interested in today?”  


“I’m not here for a film,” said Hargrove. His voice was low, almost soft, but restrained in some intangible sense. “I want to know if you’ve seen my stepdaughter, Maxine.”  


Steve blinked, and Hargrove’s expression darkened.  


“I know that you know who I’m talking about,” he continued. “I’m aware that you babysit her friends from time to time. Has she been in here tonight?”  


“No, sir,” said Steve, automatically. “Have you lost her?”  


Hargrove scowled. “She told my wife that she was going to study for a test with a friend this evening. Apparently, Susan forgot that Maxine had told us three days previously that she had no tests coming up.”  


Steve shrugged. “School, man. The workload’s crazy.”  


Hargrove shot him a flat, unimpressed, look. “I’m not an idiot, boy. I know when I’m being lied to. By her, and by you. She told you not to tell me where she was, correct?”  


“She didn’t say that, sir,” said Steve, and then mentally kicked himself. “I mean – erm –“  


The merest hint of a smile crossed Hargrove’s face. “I see. Who was she with? That Sinclair boy?” He almost spat Lucas’s name.  


Steve tried his hardest to look sincere. “No, sir. She was with a girl from her class – I don’t know, Katie someone, I think. They rented Grease, maybe two hours ago?”  


Hargrove, slowly, nodded. For the first time, Steve noticed how the man was standing – his feet slightly apart, his weight balanced, as though he was preparing himself for a fight to break out at any moment. “Thank you for your…eventual…cooperation. I would advise you not to lie to my face again, if I ask you a civil question.”  


Steve bit down on the first question that came to his tongue, which was ‘What about an uncivil question?’, and nodded, saying, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”  


Hargrove continued to stand there, casting his eyes around the store, and staring at Steve, and then – without much warning – he turned on one heel, and was gone, slamming the door behind him as he went.  


Beeching. It all came back to Beeching.  


As long as he had not made his move yet, Steve could not prepare for the future, could not think about life after Hawkins. As long as the threat hung over them, he would have to remain here, standing by his friends, ready to protect them with what little ability he had.  


When would the next crisis hit? When was the hammer going to fall?  


Steve put his head back down on the countertop, and slept.  


When he woke, the lights were flickering slightly. It was well past midnight – the shift long ago finished – and it had stopped raining outside, with the illumination of the streetlamps shining through the water-dappled windows and lighting the store with a strange, unearthly, blue glow. Steve pulled himself to his feet, quickly – this place was unsettling after dark when it was only him on duty – and it was then that he noticed the piece of paper.  


It was folded neatly on the countertop, a few centimetres from where his head had been resting, and he felt a cold shiver run through him as he spun around, staring into the darkened corners of the store, looking for who the paper could have been delivered by. But there was nobody, no sign of anyone, so he grabbed the paper, and walked hurriedly to the door, and began to lock up.  


He slid the bolt down across one of the doors, and opened the other one, entering the code for the intruder alarm with a slightly unsteady hand – it took him two attempts – and, finally, closed the door and turned the key in the lock. And then, just as he was beginning to calm down, beginning to entertain the possibility that one of the kids had left the paper as some kind of weird practical joke, he saw it – the flicker of movement from within the store, far towards the back, in the shadows.  


He leapt back instinctively, backing away into the road, walking through a puddle and paying it no attention, as he kept his eyes fixed on the window of the store. And there it was again – movement, motion, a swaying of shadows. A figure, a silhouette, still and then fluid in its path across the back of the store.  


Steve Harrington took the executive decision that this was not the sort of problem suitable for just one person, and he turned, and ran, sprinting down the street, running for home, as the streetlamps flickered gently around him. He ran faster than he had done since the previous summer, casting occasional glances behind him, but no figures were following him.  


He was home, pushing the door open frantically and thanking God that Robin had left the keys in the lock to seal the house shut with, before he remembered the piece of paper. So, once his breathing had slowed back to its normal rhythm, once he had reassured himself that he was not in any imminent danger, he unfolded it, his back firmly against the door, and stared in bewilderment at the neat, regular, wholly unfamiliar handwriting.  


_There are three spies in Hawkins_ , the note simply read. _You may be interested in finding them._  


And that was all.  


*******

**Friday 31st January, 1986:**  


“Talk,” said El, as Will walked through the door.  


He almost dropped his glass of juice in surprise, stumbling back slightly. “What are you doing in my room? I thought you were doing homework –“  


“All finished,” said El, confidently and not entirely truthfully. “This is more important.”  


“What is?”  


“You. Getting you to talk.”  


She saw Will’s face shift, almost imperceptibly, moving from an expression of confused surprise to something more defensive and closed. But she was not leaving any time soon.  


“Mike,” she said. Normally, when she said that name – when talking to him, or telling Maria about him, or whenever – it was in a happy, affectionate tone; now, however, it was a prompt, a question, a challenge.  


Will stared at her. It was not hostility in his eyes, not exactly. “What about him?”  


“Why do you hate him?”  


He looked away. “I told you. I don’t hate him. I just –“  


“Well, why won’t you talk to him?”  


He said nothing.  


“You keep making up excuses,” she continued. “Pretending you’re busy.”  


“I am. Sometimes.”  


She shook her head dismissively, which was something she had seen Joyce do quite regularly. “Not too busy to talk to him. You talk to Josh.”  


“There’s a difference,” he said, but he didn’t seem entirely sure about that. He sighed, looking at the floor, and resignedly sat down on the windowsill.  


After a pause, Will began to speak. “Have you ever found it difficult to speak to someone?”  


El stared flatly at him.  


“Not like that,” he said, apologetic. “I mean, genuinely not wanting to talk to them – not out of hate or anything, just because you know that the conversation won’t be a fun one for anyone involved. Because you don’t even know what your first words would be.”  


“‘Hello’?”  


“Oh, you know what I mean. Anyway, it’s like that for me. And Mike. I just – I don’t really know what I want to say to him. If I want to say anything at all.”  


El was sitting bolt upright now, for this was the most she’d been able to get out of her brother – well, step-brother, or fake brother, or something unclear – for the whole of January on the subject of Mike. She knew, along with everyone else in the Party by this point (having gossiped about it with the others when neither Mike nor Will were present), that something had happened between them; that over Christmas, something had been broken. Mike had asked her about it from time to time, with a feigned casualness, and she had been unable to tell him the first thing about the situation. But now, she seemed to be getting somewhere.  


“What happened, Will?” she asked, her voice soft and unthreatening.  


Will was silent for a few seconds, and then seemed to come to some kind of decision, downing his juice in a single gulp and setting the empty glass down on the windowsill beside him. “He…he said something. Back in the summer. He hurt me.”  


El blinked. She knew about _that_ , of course – Mike had told her, several times, each time in an increasingly desperate tone, as if begging for some kind of absolution from her. “Why now, then?”  


“Because…because I can’t ignore it any more. And he didn’t even know, El, he didn’t even realise what he’d said. He thought the issue was something different entirely. When we talked about it, at Christmas.”  


“So tell him.”  


“I did,” said Will. “And he apologised for that as well.”  


“So what’s the problem?”  


Will shifted awkwardly in his impromptu seat. It was beginning to rain outside, El noticed.  


“You can’t tell him about this conversation,” said Will, quietly. “Please. This should…this should come from me.”  


El nodded, cautiously. “I won’t lie. But I won’t tell.”  


“Well,” said Will, shooting her a grateful smile, “the thing he said, the way he forgot about it afterwards – it made me realise. How different we were. Not through any fault of his own, I mean – people are just sometimes different. In how they’re made. Like, fundamentally. But it meant that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. And then I had to think about other things, in connection to that, and it made me realise things about myself as well, things I’d been sort of trying not to think about for years and years, and I realised that I – well, never mind. I’m not quite so sure about that any more.”  


El blinked in confusion at him, but Will seemed to have stopped paying attention to her. It was like he was speaking more to himself than to anyone else, trying to talk the whole thing through outside the confines of his own head.  


“And, I mean, I don’t know for sure,” he continued. “There was nothing else to compare with in my life. There still isn’t. But if it was true – and I know that at least half of it is – then it would mean that the whole thing was over. The Party, you, everyone. We’d never be able to do anything again; it wouldn’t work. And he hurt me, back in the summer, but that’s not the main thing. It’s that talking to him, knowing all that, would hurt me even more, and I’d only have myself to blame.”  


“Will,” said El, softly, “I don’t understand.”  


Will closed his eyes for a second, and then opened them. “He was wrong. When he said that it wasn’t his fault. Because it was.”  


And then, as if he had only just heard what he was saying, he blinked, and his eyes flickered around the room as though they were looking for a way to escape, and he staggered to his feet. He was blushing, and his hands were alive with nervous energy, and his mouth was hanging slightly open. And then he looked around like a cornered animal, and smiled apologetically at El, and then almost sprinted out of the room, and she heard the sound of the front door closing sharply.  


But an hour later, when Jonathan called the pair of them down for tea (since Joyce was still at work), he was there at the table as if nothing had happened earlier, talking around as much as he usually did but avoiding her eyes. And afterwards, when she tried to speak to him, he only smiled that scared, apologetic smile once again, and retreated to his room, with the lock clicking behind him and the faint sounds of Talking Heads beginning to play, so she presumed that this was probably a hint of some kind.  


Later – much later – she sat awake in the darkness. Joyce had returned at a quarter to midnight, and she had quietly spoken to Jonathan in the kitchen for a few minutes before they had both gone to their rooms. The music from Will’s room had stopped an hour or so before that, and the light had stopped coming from under his bedroom door not too long afterwards. So, she was fairly sure, there was nobody else awake in the house.  


On cat-light feet, she slipped out of bed, and padded across the room to turn on the light, before sinking down to sit on the floor with her back against the wall. She retrieved a piece of loose paper from beneath her bed, and placed it on the floor in front of her. And she stared at it, willing it to move with every fibre of her being.  


Once upon a time, this had been like another sense, or another limb. Thinking about how to do it would have seemed almost surplus to requirements.  


The paper did not move.  


She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, and started again, trying as hard as she could to remember the way she had felt when she moved things with her mind, before the ability had been suddenly and unexpectedly stripped away from her along with her family and her life. She tried to reconstruct the joy, the satisfaction, the unshakeable sense of self-worth that came from being able to do something that nobody else in the world was able to.  


The paper did not move.  


She took another deep breath, rubbing her forehead in frustration, and cast her mind back to Chicago. She remembered Kali’s words, the secret her sister had taught her, about anger and its tremendous potential as a source of fuel. So she began to compile a list, a familiar list, of everything which had made her angry as far back as she remembered.  


Papa. The tank. The electricity. The monster. Being torn away from Mike. Being unable to go back to her friends. Kali, and her betrayal. The Mind Flayer. The knowledge that people liked bullying her friends. Not being able to be with Mike at school or outside. Lies. Secrets. The subjunctive mood. The Mind Flayer. The deaths of forty-eight innocent people. Hopper being gone. Moving. Continuing. Separation. More secrets, more lies. Her failure to recover her powers. The Mind Flayer. Hopper still being gone.  


The paper did not move.  


She cried then, as quietly as she could, trying not to wake anyone up, and the tears fell silently into the carpet and onto the utterly motionless piece of paper. For it was always the same, always the same.  


The Mind Flayer was out there, waiting in Winterton for its moment to strike, and there was nothing she could do about it. No way that she could help her friends and family.  


And, when the tears had run dry, she picked herself up off the floor, and slid the paper back under the bed, and padded silently over to the window, and stared out of it. Looking at the stars in the clear night sky, and the great dark empty spaces between them.  


“Hi, Hop,” she whispered, in the silence of a sleeping house. “It’s day two hundred and twelve…”  


*******

**The same time:**  


He did not hear her. But then, there was not very much left of him to do the hearing anyway.  


The dark-eyed body formerly belonging to James Hopper walked slowly, casually, through the silence of a dead world, picking his way leisurely over spreading grey tendrils of decay and pools of viscous darkness.  


It was heading east. It was in no hurry.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who's stuck with the story this far - thank you very much for reading, and I really hope you're enjoying it! Please do leave comments if there's anything you want to say or any feedback you might have - as well as helping me to improve my writing and letting me know what things you'd like to see the story focusing on, it's honestly just a delight to hear from my readers!


	9. Secret Messages

**Sometime:**  


It was the end of the road.  


Frankly, calling it a road would have done roads across the real world a grave injustice. The trail that they had been following for the past couple of days was neither paved nor cobbled, without markings or junctions or edges. It had been carved into the landscape by the tracks of tanks and military vehicles, and that was all it was – a sheep-track for humans. There were no bridges along its route, despite the numerous rivers (or things that looked from a distance like rivers) it was required to cross; and there were no signposts, because the only place the road went to was its end.  


And here it was, laid out below them in the leaden greyness of another day in the Shadow World. The reason why the road existed; the only plausible hope the two of them had for returning home one day. Ozerov’s camp.  


Nikolay pulled the truck to a halt on the ridgeline above the camp, and hesitantly nudged the sleeping Kali. Her eyes snapped open, glaring at the light and at Nikolay.  


“We’re here,” he said. “They’ve got spyplanes.”  


Kali nodded, but said nothing. What she was not saying – and what Nikolay was not reminding her – was that, without the planes, their journey would have been entirely pointless, with no other way of getting to America. Nikolay was not entirely confident in the plan the two of them appeared to have ended up with – which, as far as he could tell, appeared to boil down to crossing their respective fingers and hoping that Kali’s magic sister would somehow be able to rescue them once they were in the Shadow World’s version of Indiana – but it was, against all odds, the best that they had to work with.  


He retrieved the binoculars from somewhere down in the footwell, and peered down the hill into the camp. There was movement, thank goodness – it had not been devastated by the Flower-Sharks or by worse, as Nikolay had feared – but not much of it. Perhaps Ozerov was just running a particularly tight ship. The camp was ringed with crude watchtowers and half-dug trenches, with barbed wire strewn across the bare landscape in all directions, and was composed of a handful of tents strung between tanks. Behind the camp was the runway that Ozerov had been using for the spyplanes – three remained, although he had left with five – and behind that, the sea, ink-dark and leisurely pulsing, like a great slow heartbeat. Nikolay was trying not to think about the sea.  


“Why are you waiting?” said Kali, her irritated voice hoarse with the ash that floated in the air. “Enjoying the view?”  


Nikolay rolled his eyes. This was how most of their interactions had gone for the past few days of travel. “Just taking a moment to prepare myself.”  


But he started the truck again, and began to manoeuvre it down the final rocky descent towards the camp, because she was right. There was nothing to be gained from waiting.  


They were met by three guards at the gates of the camp, each of them with darkened eyes and suspicious glares. Nikolay opened the door of the truck, and climbed out, trying not to display his nervousness.  


“Good day, comrades,” he said.  


One of them shook their head. “There are no days here.”  


Nikolay was not entirely sure what to say to that. “Good night, then, I suppose. I bring news from Klyuchi – is Colonel Ozerov here?”  


He did not miss the looks that the guards exchanged, wary and unwilling. Finally, one nodded. “He’s in his headquarters, I think. But you should probably tread carefully around him. He’s under a lot of stress at the moment.”  


Nikolay, slowly, nodded, hearing the warning for what it was. “Thank you, comrade.”  


He climbed back into the truck, alongside Kali, who had restored her Vosemov illusion and was sitting confidently in the passenger seat, and they were waved through, past the layers and layers of barbed wire and gun emplacements, into the heart of the camp. It was just as quiet as it had looked from the ridgeline; there were very few soldiers outside the tents, and those that were there – generally on patrol – had the unmistakeable air of people wanting to get an unpleasant task over and done with as soon as possible.  


Ozerov’s tent was quite clear. It was not only the largest, but also the most heavily fortified, ringed with bear-traps and sharpened stakes. One of the guards from the gate had followed them, and – clearly not enjoying the experience – stuck his head through the folds of canvas, and murmured a few words, before beckoning the two of them in after him.  


Ozerov had set up a desk in the shadowed corner of the tent, and was staring away from them as they entered, at the pools of darkness that did not appear to correspond to the positions of any of the lights there.  


“This whole place is wrong,” he said, his voice oddly calm and dispassionate. Nikolay and Kali glanced at each other, unsure of whether Ozerov was addressing them or not. “No sun, but life. No people, but buildings. No intelligence, no civilisation, but… And the stars – oh, God, the stars…”  


He trailed off. The guard gestured to Nikolay, indicating that this was his cue to speak.  


“Comrade Vosemov and I bring news from Klyuchi, Comrade Colonel,” said Nikolay, dreading the reaction he was about to receive. “The base has been attacked and destroyed, and the Gate has been forcibly closed. We’re stuck here.”  


Ozerov, who had been swaying slightly, froze. “How?”  


“Creatures from this world, sir,” said Nikolay. “Lured to the base by the American prisoner Brenner, who then sabotaged the Gate. Stepanov is dead, and we were the only ones able to escape through the Gate, as far as we know.”  


Ozerov, very slowly, turned his head towards the pair of them, with the precision and regularity of a mechanical searchlight, but his face was still in shadow. “You mean to tell me that there is no way out?”  


“Well,” said Nikolay, knowing that he had no other options but to be candid, “there is one possibility. The Americans might still have a Gate operational, or might have established another one since last summer. If we make our way to Indiana –“  


“No,” said Ozerov, quietly, the words cutting through Nikolay’s suggestions.  


Kali’s illusion raised its eyebrows and tilted its head, inviting Ozerov to elaborate.  


“Do you think I am an idiot, Palenko?” said Ozerov. “Do you think I cannot see what has happened here?”  


Nikolay had no idea how to answer this question.  


“The men here have clearly given you a false impression of me,” Ozerov continued. “I am aware that they call me paranoid, whisper behind my back that I am losing my grip, and they have evidently misled you into thinking that I will be easy to fool. Easy to trick, when in truth, I am the only one here who understands the nature of this dimension.”  


“I’m sorry, sir?” said Nikolay.  


“This is not a rational place,” said Ozerov, his voice cold and yet certain. “This is a world which makes a mockery of all of our ideas of science, of logic, of reason. But we are Soviet soldiers – we are the wave of the future, the bannermen of progress – and we will bring order and civilisation to this world. I will bring order. I will.”  


The guard, Nikolay noticed, was shifting from foot to foot, uneasily.  


“The soldiers here are frankly not up to the task,” continued Ozerov, quieter now. “I left Klyuchi with thirty; fifteen of them are gone, either deserted or taken by the creatures here. And the few that remain, clearly, have allowed you to believe that I am the sort of fool who will not recognise treason when I see it.”  


“Treason?” said Nikolay.  


Ozerov nodded, his lips curving into a grim smile across his still-shadowed face. “You wish to throw yourselves on the mercy of the Americans. To betray your country, your people – presumably, to sell them the secrets of Project Nutcracker. And you think that I will allow this, will collaborate with you on this. Well, Palenko, you should know that there are people who serve a higher purpose than you. There are still some people who serve the nation.”  


Despite himself, Nikolay let out a short bark of laughter. “Really, Ozerov? You think that’s what this is about? You think that that matters any more?”  


“Out here,” said Ozerov, “it’s the only thing that matters.”  


And he leaned forwards, finally, and the light fell across his face, and Nikolay looked into his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who had long ago lost any remaining grip on reality; supremely self-assured and confident, wide and unblinking, and ever so slightly darkened around the edges, as though ink or oil was creeping in somewhere.  


“Have Palenko and Vosemov shot,” said Ozerov to the guard, still quite calmly, and Kali exploded into action.  


The spectral image of Vosemov flickered, and split into two identical copies, with each one heading towards the guard. The guard’s hand was only halfway to his pistol before he let out a cry of surprise, and turned to defend himself against something not visible to Nikolay; a second later, he was sprawling on the floor, dark red blood spilling from his throat, as the Vosemov-illusions disappeared to reveal Kali sheathing a knife (where had she found a knife?) and turning to Ozerov. Nikolay’s combat reflexes, by this point, had also kicked in, and – in a single swift movement – he stood, and leapt across the desk, and grabbed Ozerov in a headlock, knocking the gun out of the other man’s hand as he did.  


“Colonel,” said Nikolay, holding him steady, “I promise you, this is not treason. We’re trying to help you, to help everyone. We need to get to America if we’re ever going to make it out of here.”  


“Traitor,” murmured Ozerov, but it was not clear if he was directly addressing Nikolay, his voice soft and somehow disconnected. “Betraying the Soviet Union. Traitors to progress, all of them. There’s no way out of here.”  


“There is,” Nikolay insisted, despite his misgivings. “We can find a way out, if we work together.”  


“The only way out,” said Ozerov, “is to burn this whole place down to the ground and start again.”  


And that was all he said, for that was when Kali stabbed him in the throat, and – without a word, without a sound – he collapsed to the grey floor.  


“Come on,” she said, coldly, already beginning to restore the illusion of Vosemov as she walked to the door. “We need to be quick.”  


She was halfway to the runway by the time Nikolay caught up with her.  


“Why the hell did you do that?” he hissed, under his breath.  


She blinked in confusion at him. “Do what?”  


“You killed the guard,” said Nikolay. “He was clearly on our side there. Everyone in this camp knew that Ozerov was insane; he wouldn’t have executed us.”  


Kali tilted her head in consideration, as though this was nothing more than an interesting counterfactual. “You’re probably right, actually. But still, better safe than sorry.”  


“No,” said Nikolay. “You just murdered someone – two people, actually, there was no need to kill Ozerov, just to secure him. We needed to get a plane. That was all.”  


Kali shrugged.  


“And the blood,” Nikolay continued. “It’ll draw the Flower-Sharks here. The whole base is at risk now, thanks to you.”  


“Why do you care?” said Kali, sounding honestly perplexed as she climbed through the fence onto the runway. “They don’t stand a chance in the long run anyway.”  


“Because they’re people,” said Nikolay. “Just because they’re Soviet soldiers doesn’t mean that they’re faceless minions, you know. That guard was a human being, and you murdered him to be on the safe side. You might have killed them all.”  


“Fine,” said Kali. “Go back for them. Help them, defend them, I don’t care. I’ve got more important things to do than that. I’m going back to the real world, and I’m going to stop Brenner.”  


Nikolay honestly considered it. He could stand with his countrymen, help them try to survive the winter of the far north of the Shadow World. He could help to fight off Flower-Sharks, could help them construct traps and fortifications that would keep them safe. He could wait until another Gate was eventually opened.  


He could let Martin Brenner walk free, go back to his experiments. He could die, pointlessly, alongside fellow Soviet soldiers, for a government that would never know what had happened in Klyuchi. He could abandon the real world to its fate.  


Hating himself for it, for the coldness and calculation and utilitarian logic of the situation, he shook his head. “No. I’m coming with you. But if you kill any more innocent people, if you treat anyone else as obstacles to be dealt with like that, then this is over.”  


Kali would not meet his eyes, but she smirked slightly. “It’s a deal. Not like we’ll be meeting any more people any time soon anyway.”  


And they climbed into the cockpit of the fragile, gossamer spyplane that was supposed to take them to the other side of the world, and Nikolay readied himself in the pilot’s seat and tried to recall everything he had learned about how to fly an aeroplane when they had been training him, however many years ago. And then they were racing down the runway, and losing contact with the ground, and climbing into the leaden sky, and Nikolay glanced down at the tiny, shrinking base, and whispered a silent apology to the men there through a bitter-tasting mouth. And then it was gone, hidden by the clouds, and the only thing that they could see was darkness, darkness all around.  


*******

**Saturday 1st February, 1986:**  


The silence that hung over the table was not a comfortable one. It was, at the very least, a familiar one by this point.  


“This pie is really wonderful, Mrs Wheeler,” said Jasna. One of the five of them, she thought, had to say something at some point.  


The woman sitting across the table from her, who had been staring quite intently into the depths of a glass of red wine, jolted in faint surprise, as though she had just woken up. “Oh, thank you, Jasna. Please, do call me Karen. You’ve been here for long enough now, after all.”  


Jasna said nothing, biting her lip slightly and taking a sip of juice to try and hide the stress that had suddenly risen to the fore. For Mrs Wheeler – Karen – was right; she had been in Hawkins, living rent-free in her basement, for almost a month now, which was longer than she had ever really been anywhere that was not the old apartment back in Washington. And the more she tried not to think about the fact that she was living on another family’s generosity and charity – the longer she pushed these thoughts to one side, as Nancy had repeatedly told her to (in a tone that she presumably believed to be reassuring) – the more guilty she felt when the subject became impossible to not think about. Like now.  


“I’ll get a job,” she blurted out, into the settling silence, and only then remembered that this was not what everyone had been talking about. “Sorry, Mrs Wheeler – Karen – sorry. I mean, I’ll start looking for a job, for weekends or evenings or something, so that I can contribute to some of the bills. I mean –“  


Her nervous rambling was finally, mercifully, cut off. “Don’t worry about it, dear. It’s all fine – you’re Nancy’s friend, so we’re very happy to take you in. And, besides, you’ve got your final year of school to be focusing on.”  


“Yazzy’s already very clever,” said Holly, from the other end of the table, who had long since given up on eating the pie in favour of trying to balance her knife on top of her fork. “She taught me all about fractions and Europe yesterday.”  


Jasna, despite herself, smiled slightly. She would be overjoyed if her exams were mostly focused on fractions and Europe this year.  


“Seriously,” said Nancy, looking directly at Jasna (Jasna tried not to meet her eyes), “it’s fine. I looked through the accounts the other day, and –“  


“I beg your pardon?” said Karen.  


Nancy blinked, and slowly turned to face her mother. “I just had a look at the family accounts. Just to check that we were alright, after – you know –“  


“No, Nancy, I don’t know,” said Karen. “Why were you looking through our confidential financial documents? After what?”  


“After Dad left, of course,” said Mike, whose tone was marginally less confrontational than his mother’s, but not by much. “Like, come on, Mom, he was bringing in the money. Nancy and I just wanted to see if we –“  


“Oh, I see,” said Karen darkly, taking another sip of wine, “you’re both in on this.”  


Jasna said nothing, and wondered to herself if she could somehow slide gradually under the table and escape from the conversation without anybody noticing.  


“Well,” Karen continued, her voice growing gradually louder, “for the record, children, your father has agreed to keep sending money here to pay for bills and food and the like. And in future, I’d greatly appreciate it if you were to talk to me about your worries, rather than rummaging through our private papers.”  


“When?” shouted Nancy.  


Another silence fell over the table. This one was much less awkward, and much more tense.  


“When should we talk to you, Mom?” Nancy continued. “You clearly don’t want to talk to us about any of this, after all. You haven’t even fucking told us why Dad walked out.”  


Karen blinked a couple of times, clutching the stem of the glass so hard that Jasna could see the whiteness of her fingers. “Nancy Wheeler,” she began, in a stern tone, but her voice cracked halfway through. She stopped, and cleared her throat, and started again.  


“Your father and I had been arguing about a few things in the last six months,” she said, impressively steady, “and then Sovereign Banking offered him a job in another state, at some major bank. I had hoped that he would stay, that he would turn the job down, but he apparently thought that the pay and the opportunities were too good to refuse. There, I hope you’re happy with that.”  


“Ecstatic,” muttered Nancy, and then – pursing her lips – she stood up quite abruptly, knocking the chair over as she did, and marched out of the room. Jasna wasn’t entirely sure, but she thought that there might have been tears in her eyes as she did.  


Karen’s gaze flicked, possibly not deliberately, to Mike, but he did not look like he was about to storm out as well – he was simply staring, quite deliberately, at the tablecloth in front of him – so she, too, stood, and left the room, following Nancy. Holly stared after her, and then turned back to Jasna and Mike, with a pleading, imploring expression that seemed a few moments away from tears of her own.  


“Hey, Holly,” said Jasna, in what was supposed to be a bright tone. “Do you want me to teach you some more about geography?”  


Holly cocked her head in confusion, not looking any happier or less afraid. Jasna stared back, having run out of other ideas.  


Mercifully, Mike came to the rescue. “Or we could find some cartoons or colouring books for you?”  


“Yes,” said Jasna. “Cartoons. That would work.”  


Holly, slowly, nodded. “Why’s Nancy mad, Mike?”  


Mike, who had been in the process of standing up, sank back down into his chair. “It’s a long story, Holly.”  


“Are they fighting now?”  


Mike shrugged, looking back down at the tablecloth. “Maybe. But I’m sure they’ll make up eventually. That’s the thing with arguments, Hols – they don’t last forever, and it’s OK to argue with someone if you make up with them afterwards, if they apologise.”  


His voice sounded strange, but Jasna didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell what this signified, so she merely sat there as he carried his sister through to the living room, and then – at a loss for what else to do – finished her pie, and began to clear the table. Mike returned to the kitchen a few minutes later.  


“You don’t need to worry about cleaning all of that up,” he said, but did not appear too dismayed that she was doing so.  


“It’s fine,” said Jasna. “I used to work in a café, so it’s nothing unusual.”  


Mike nodded, and began to dry the plates she had stacked on the draining board. “Sorry, by the way. About –“ he gestured towards the dining table, presumably meaning the argument that had happened there.  


Jasna shrugged. “Not your fault. Jonathan warned me that this would happen eventually.”  


Mike’s mouth twitched. “Yeah. Nancy’s predictable like that.”  


Jasna smiled as well. In the past month, this was probably the longest conversation she had had with Mike, who had spent most of the time either with some schoolfriends of his or talking to his girlfriend over an absurdly powerful walkie-talkie.  


Abruptly, the younger boy froze, staring out of the window, the plate in his hand forgotten.  


“What is it?” said Jasna, turning to look. There was no sign of anything outside, to her eyes, at least within the range of the Wheelers’ front porch light.  


“I thought I saw movement,” said Mike, and his voice was strangely quiet.  


“What, like a person? What’s so weird about that?”  


“Not the right kind of movement,” said Mike, still staring intently out of the window.  


“It’s probably nothing,” suggested Jasna, not entirely sure that this was true herself.  


“It never is in Hawkins,” said Mike. All of the weariness and frustration that had been hanging over him seemed to have dissipated, to be replaced with a slowly fading alertness. “Not since 1983.”  


Jasna tried to remember what Nancy and Jonathan had told her in the car on that long drive out of Washington. “When Jonathan’s brother was taken by the thing? Your friend?”  


Mike looked away. “Yeah. Sort of. I don’t know if he’d agree any more.”  


“That he was taken by a monster?”  


“That we’re friends,” said Mike. “He won’t talk to me now.”  


“Why not?” said Jasna, feeling as though she were beginning to descend down a rabbit-hole.  


“I don’t know,” said Mike. “I don’t have a fucking clue. Or, rather, I do, but I don’t know what to do about it.”  


Jasna leaned back against the fridge, bracing herself for the story, which seemed to be incoming regardless of whether she wanted to hear it or not.  


“Last summer, we fell out, and I said some shitty things to him,” said Mike. He was still holding the dry plate, and did not seem aware of this. “And then, at Christmas, I tried to apologise for them, and he said that wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t understand what I’d done and couldn’t really apologise for it. And now, when we phone them down in Virginia, he won’t talk to me unless everyone else is there, and it’s like – it’s like I’ve lost my best friend, and it’s my fault, and he won’t tell me how to make things right again.”  


Jasna exhaled slowly. “Why do you think he knows? How to get back to normal?”  


Mike shrugged. “I don’t know if he even wants to go back to how things were. Actually, you know, I don’t know when we’d be going back to. Before he was taken, I guess?”  


Jasna said nothing.  


“But that’s not even the main thing,” Mike continued. “I just don’t get want he wants from me – like, I’ve apologised, and apparently that was the wrong thing to do.”  


“Look,” said Jasna, drawing on her almost non-existent experience of social situations, “maybe it just takes time. Maybe you can’t force these things.”  


Mike’s expression became somewhat belligerent at this suggestion, but he tilted his head in acknowledgement.  


“And, you know,” Jasna continued, not entirely sure where she was going with this, “maybe, whatever you said to him that started all of this – maybe it was just a lot closer to the bone than you might have thought.” Silently, she remembered the words that had been thrown around by Jen Stanton and her friends in Washington, which had proved to be a lot more effective than they might have ever hoped them to be.  


Mike was staring into space.  


“Just an idea,” concluded Jasna, somewhat lamely.  


“No,” said Mike, in a faraway voice. “I think you might be right. After all, Lonnie always – but he’d have said that – but – oh…” He trailed off, a dawning comprehension in his voice.  


Jasna said nothing. Frankly, she thought to herself, it was a minor miracle that she’d been this helpful in the first place, and she had no plans of messing that up now.  


“So you think I should leave him be, for now?” said Mike. “Like, not try and force things?”  


Jasna shrugged, and when it appeared that this was not the kind of answer Mike had been hoping for, nodded slowly. “It can’t hurt. I don’t think. But, erm, I’m not exactly the expert here –“  


“No, you’re right,” said Mike, and slowly, distractedly, began to wander away, clearly lost in thought, as if a whole new mental world had rapidly opened itself up to him.  


A minute later, he returned, somewhat sheepishly, and placed the plate in the cupboard, before leaving again.  


*******

**Sunday 2nd February, 1986:**  


The door swung open, revealing El on the other side, holding a carving knife in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. She pointed them at Josh, challengingly.  


“Favourite film,” she said. It was not a question, but a demand.  


“Easy,” said Josh. “It’s called _The Man Who Saved The World_ , and it’s about this space pilot called Murat who, well –“  


El shook her head, cutting him off. “The film is right. The plot isn’t on the list. Favourite song?”  


Josh crossed his eyes slightly, trying to remember what he had put down. “ _99 Red Balloons_? No, _Enola Gay_?”  


El nodded at the latter. “First time you met Will?”  


Josh did not need to think about this. “November. The anniversary of when he was taken. He was in one of the empty classrooms where I do my prayers, and we started talking, and he was…” He trailed off. “Anyway, is that good enough?”  


El narrowed her eyes, and then lowered her weapons, allowing herself to smile. “Good enough. Come in.”  


He followed her through the living room, and up the stairs to Will’s bedroom, which had become their de facto headquarters over the past few weeks. Maria was already there, absently leafing through Will’s drawings of horrifying monsters, whilst Will sat cross-legged on his bed, staring into space and chewing on his lower lip.  


“Josh is here,” announced El, to the room at large. “We can start.”  


Maria waved, and Will smiled at Josh as he entered. Josh grinned back, trying to mask the nervousness that seemed to wash over him whenever Will turned his full attention towards him; by now, it was almost second nature.  


“Right,” said Will. He didn’t look as though he’d been sleeping very well recently, or indeed at all, and he seemed, for some unclear reason, to be avoiding El’s eyes. “Session number three. If we’re all up for that?”  


Maria and Josh both nodded, possibly more eagerly than the situation seemed to call for.  


“The Vestige,” Will continued. He reached over to his bedside table, and retrieved a pencil drawing that had not been there the previous week: the four of them, their backs to the fire, with shadowy and uncanny figures advancing on them from all sides.  


“Horrifying subject aside, that’s actually really impressive,” said Josh. “I like the shades of colour.”  


Will looked away from him, smiling slightly.  


“It’s honestly disturbing that you keep that by your bed, though,” said Maria. “Like, come on, man, find a book to read. You’ll get nightmares.”  


Will’s expression changed slightly, the smile becoming ever-so-slightly more strained and artificial. “Anyway. We’ve talked already about how we can defend ourselves against it –“  


El flicked the lighter, and hefted a can of hairspray in the other hand. Josh had absolutely no doubt that she would not hesitate to use it.  


“–and we’ve discussed what it wants from us,” Will continued. “Specifically, the memories of me and El, of everything we know about the Upside-Down and of the experience of being part of the Mind Flayer. Now, agenda for this week: how can it spread itself?”  


Maria put her hand up.  


“We said you didn’t have to do that,” El pointed out.  


Maria lowered her hand. “I’ve done some research. Well, not really research. I’ve read a bunch of Stephen King and Lovecraft. Does that count?”  


Will shrugged. “You know what, it’s as good as anything at this stage. Worked for us with D&D manuals last year, somehow. What did you find?”  


“There’s this thing called cosmic horror,” said Maria, “and, basically, the idea is that there are some things that the human mind just can’t handle. Like, alien things, or things from other dimensions – so like the Mind Flayer, basically – and the books say that when people perceive them, their sanity just sort of erodes, and they go mad. With the knowledge, with the awareness that all of human civilisation is built on flawed foundations. People see these things, really see them, and they break.”  


“And you think that the Vestige is doing that to people?” said Josh. “Breaking their minds?”  


Maria nodded slowly. “It fits with what happened to Dad. It’s not that he thinks his memories from that night aren’t real; he genuinely can’t remember any of it any more. Like his brain’s just refused to deal with the information, destroyed the knowledge, so that he doesn’t lose any more of himself.”  


Will nodded, in return. His eyebrows seemed to be folding in on themselves when he concentrated, Josh mused.  


“How?” said El. “How did he see enough to break?”  


“They must be exposing themselves to their victims,” said Josh, and then realised what he had said. “Erm. No. Not like that. I mean, the Vestige, when it wants to possess someone, it would have to be focusing all of its energies on that, not on controlling people. Because their brains still work when there’s a fraction of the Vestige in there – they can still remember human things – but they’d need to completely overpower, or at least completely dominate, the original mind, if they want to get a new subject.”  


“How do we know that they still remember human things?” said Will, frowning.  


“Easy,” said Josh. He’d realised this the other day, whilst he’d been utterly failing to do his math homework. “They can walk, they can talk, they can blend in with society. They need to have enough of the original memories still in place if they want to disguise themselves; the Mind Flayer doesn’t know enough about shipping to work in the docks or wherever. Then there’s the control of the body – enough control to talk and to move around. For humans, it takes years to learn that sort of stuff, to get the muscle memory required to not just immediately fall over when you want to go somewhere. The Vestige might be clever, but it hasn’t got that much practice under its belt. Therefore, it must be leaving enough of the original brain still intact to access its knowledge, and to get it to operate the body. Therefore therefore, when it destroys somebody’s sanity, it can’t be with the normal…amount…of Vestige-ness that lives in someone’s head. It’s got to be the entire thing.”  


Everyone was staring at him. Josh tried to focus on Maria and El, and to avoid Will’s eyes, because blushing might have undermined his point slightly.  


“It makes sense,” said Maria. “I don’t know if it’s right or not, but it seems like it makes sense.”  


El nodded. “What does it mean?”  


“It means,” said Will, slowly, thoughtfully, “that when it’s possessing someone, it’s vulnerable. It’s all in the same place; it can’t hide.”  


“Also,” said Josh, “all the people would have to be in the same place when they’re inducting a new person.”  


“Which means,” said Will, “that they’d need a special place to do it, a lair. Otherwise someone could walk in when they’re at their most vulnerable.”  


“Which also means,” continued Josh, “that when they took Mr Glenny into the woods, and left him there as a trap for us, they were trying to lure you to the lair, so that they could possess you.”  


“So the lair’s out in the woods,” finished Will.  


They were looking directly at one another now, the excitement on Will’s face mirroring that which Josh was feeling, and, somehow, the whole problem felt a lot less insoluble than it had done ten minutes previously.  


El cleared her throat slightly, and Josh blinked, spinning round towards her possibly somewhat faster than he had really needed to. Out of the corner of his eyes, he noticed that Will was doing the same, his pale face reddening slightly.  


“So,” said El, “we can kill it. If we’re lucky.”  


An hour later, him and Maria were leaving, stepping out into the rainy night again, as the Byers twins (and Josh was not going to stop thinking of them as twins, despite the revelations to the contrary; they were too in-sync with one another, and far too similar in personality, to convince his subconscious) waved them goodbye from the shelter of their porch. They were normally driven back by Will’s brother, with faint and depressing music playing over the radio as they were escorted back to Maria’s house and then to his, but tonight – it transpired – Jonathan was asleep, despite it only being six o’clock, and Will had proved either unable or unwilling to awaken him, so they had volunteered to walk. They had not known about the rain at that point.  


“How’s your dad now?” asked Josh.  


Maria shrugged, the motion displacing raindrops from her coat. “I don’t know. We thought he was getting better – they discharged him from the hospital – but he’s had a couple of fainting spells since, and apparently he’s suffering from insomnia. Can’t sleep at night, and he doesn’t know why.”  


“Supports the cosmic-horror theory,” mused Josh.  


Maria stiffened slightly. “Yeah. Thanks. My dad’s mind has snapped.”  


“Sorry,” said Josh, hurriedly. “I didn’t mean – I wasn’t really thinking there. That didn’t come across very well.”  


“Yeah,” said Maria, but there was forgiveness in her tone. “You’re weird, Bateyi. You’re getting far too into this.”  


“What do you mean?”  


Maria laughed slightly. “Sorry, you should have seen yourself earlier. You and Will.”  


“What, with our theories?”  


“Yeah. It was like you forgot that anyone else was there. It was kind of endearing, really, if you ignore the subject of the conversation.”  


“Erm. Endearing?”  


Maria fixed him with a knowing stare. “Yeah, extremely endearing. You know, since you’re clearly in love with him.”  


Josh felt the breath catch in his throat, and turned to stare back at her, and walked into a streetlight.  


The pain blossomed over his face almost instantly, followed by a deep, dull shock, a reverberation in his bones, as he stumbled and barely caught himself from falling to the wet tarmac of the sidewalk. Yet, somehow, this was not the main thing on his mind.  


“What?” he said.  


Maria’s expression was very strange indeed, her mouth thin and straight, and she was not meeting his eyes.  


“Look,” he said, “I can explain. We’re friends, and that’s all there is between us – I’ve never – no, I mean, I’m not – please, Maria, I need you to understand –“  


“Josh,” said Maria, her tone oddly controlled. “I’m fine with it. Honestly, I am. And I’ll talk to you about it in a moment. But first, please can you let me laugh at you for walking into a lamppost?”  


Josh’s mouth fell open in surprise, and apparently that was the final straw, because Maria could evidently hold it together no longer, as she burst out laughing. And Josh – without any good idea what else to say or do – found himself joining in.  


“Is it really that obvious?” he said, a few minutes later, when they had calmed down.  


Maria grinned. “Well. Yeah. Kind of. To me, at least. I don’t think people at school would notice, since they don’t see as much of you.”  


“And you’re honestly fine with it? Seriously?”  


“Yeah, I think so. Like, I don’t understand it, but it’s none of my business, and you two both seem to like each other, so….”  


“Yeah,” said Josh. “Maybe. I don’t know.”  


“You could ask him?”  


“Yeah, I could. I probably should.”  


“So go on, then. Next weekend, next meeting.”  


Josh shook his head. “I’m definitely not going to, though.”  


“Why not? Like, are you religiously opposed?”  


“What? No. I’m socially incompetent and cowardly.”  


Maria tilted her head. “Yeah, that would do it. But seriously, Bateyi, you should tell him.”  


“But I can’t,” said Josh. “That’s not how my brain works. I can’t make myself take that step into the unknown like that. I can’t take the risk, in case I’ve judged it wrong.”  


“So what’s your plan?”  


“Same as I’m doing at the moment. Keep dropping hints that I might like him, hope that he does something about it. Keep sending him secret messages and hope that he actually wants to decrypt them.”  


“That’s a useless plan,” said Maria. They were outside her house now; Josh lived five doors down from the Glenny residence, and could sprint that in less than thirty seconds if he had to.  


“Yeah,” said Josh, quietly, as she retrieved the house key from her pocket and made her way up the small garden path to the safety of home. “Well, I’m a useless person.”  


The words were not quite as witty as he had intended them to be, but Maria didn’t seem to have heard them, as she only waved goodbye to him and closed the door.  


*******

_–a scream, a silent and wordless cry of pain, lasting for weeks and echoing, reverberating, across a dead planet; the scream of someone who had not been allowed to entirely die –_  


*******

**Tuesday 4th February, 1986:**  


A gale had descended upon Hawkins in the past couple of days, and as Max made her way out of the school, into the parking lot, she decided there and then that there was no way in hell that she was going to skate home today.  


Mike and Dustin had already gone, it seemed, because Lucas was sitting there by himself, in the shelter of the wall, reading something. She made her way over to him.  


“Hey,” she greeted him. “Still here?”  


Lucas glanced up from his book, and shuffled along the bench slightly, making room for her. “Got to wait for Erica before Mom can pick us up. She’s still got another fifteen minutes of school. Plus, I laughed at Steve’s new haircut, and he said that he wouldn’t give me a ride.”  


Max nodded in understanding, sitting next to him. “What are you reading?”  


“This?” said Lucas, sounding oddly startled by the question.  


“Yes, stalker, obviously that,” she said. “There’s clearly nothing else that I could be talking about here. What is it?”  


“It’s a bunch of essays and short pieces of writing,” said Lucas. “About states and nations and stuff. I got it out of the library at lunchtime; it’s pretty good. There’s this one, by a French guy called Ernest Renan, which says –“  


“Yeah, cool,” said Max. “This isn’t a conversation that I’m going to get anything out of, I don’t think. You’re very welcome to your whole philosophy thing without dragging me into it. What I was going to say is, can I get a ride back to mine?”  


Lucas looked mildly mutinous at her dismissal of his book, but nodded. “Sure. Not skating?”  


“I would die of either cold or being blown into a tree,” said Max. “And my mom can’t pick me up any more; she’s got a job at last.”  


“Oh?”  


“Yeah. Melvald’s, where Mrs Byers used to work. That other person there, the French woman, she got fired for never turning up on time any more, so Mom applied for the opening and got it.”  


“Cool,” said Lucas. “Hey, Max?”  


“Yeah?”  


“You listen to the news much?”  


Max shook her head. “I preferred their earlier stuff.”  


Lucas rolled his eyes. “I heard something, this morning. We tend to listen to the radio over breakfast, the whole family, get the news and then turn it off when they start playing country music.”  


Max felt a momentary flash of envy, a very familiar and wholly unfair envy – Lucas’s descriptions of what sounded to her like domestic bliss were nothing new, but reminded her every single time that she had no such comfort or fortification. Once again, she buried it, because it was not his fault.  


“What did you hear?” she said instead.  


“How much do you know about UFOs?”  


Max snorted, and punched him in the shoulder, turning her back on him. “OK, I thought you were being serious. That’s on me.”  


“No, bear with,” said Lucas. His tone certainly sounded serious, at the very least. “There’s this thing, right, that UFO stuff often talks about. Cattle mutilations.”  


“Oh, sure, because aliens are going to fly hundreds of light years for a nice rump steak –“  


“Yeah, I know, it’s weird. But yeah, they say that the aliens are taking cows and doing experiments on them, for some reason, I don’t know. That’s not the point.”  


“Then what the hell is the point? Where are you going with any of this?”  


“Yesterday was a slow news day, apparently,” said Lucas. “So this morning, they did a whole segment on it, and said that there’s been a big spate of cattle mutilations recently, in various villages across West Virginia and Kentucky and Indiana. In a line, like something’s moving slowly west.”  


It took Max only a moment to realise, and then it hit her. “Oh, no. Seriously?”  


Lucas nodded. “Yep. Obviously, Hawkins is on the path.”  


“Yeah,” said Max, and she was not trying to disguise the anger in her tone this time. “Because we haven’t had anything happen to us yet this month, so it’s fucking overdue, isn’t it?”  


“It’s the 4th,” said Lucas, in the sort of tone that made her understand why he had been bullied throughout middle school.  


“I know what fucking day it is,” muttered Max. “I was being hyperbolic. Or metaphorical. Or something, I don’t know, I slept through English class today. So, the aliens are coming to town as well?”  


“Well, sort of,” said Lucas. “If it helps, I don’t think they’re anything new. Or plural, unless we’re really unlucky.”  


“What do you mean?”  


“That thing that attacked the bus. The one that Dustin keeps calling a Manticore, and you keep kicking him in the shins for calling it that. It’s massive; it’d need a lot of food to stay alive, especially if it’s only taking a couple of bites from each cow, like the radio said. Maybe it doesn’t really like food from this dimension.”  


“And it’s coming this way because?”  


Lucas sighed slightly; it looked almost as though he was deflating. “Well, I mean, probably because we’re here. Let’s be honest, it’s got to be something to do with us.”  


“Yeah,” said Max. “It always is. Well, great, we have to kill a big fuck-off magic bear now as well, or get eaten by it. Brilliant. I didn’t have anything in my diary for the next few weeks.”  


Lucas chuckled under his breath. “We should probably tell the others.”  


“I’ll tell Mike, you tell Dustin,” she said. “I’ve got history with him tomorrow morning. The monster won’t be here immediately, right?”  


Lucas nodded. “I’ve got to say, it’s still really weird hearing you say that you’ll talk to Mike. Like, voluntarily, and non-aggressively. What the hell happened?”  


Max shrugged. For some reason, she had been avoiding telling anyone exactly what had happened between them in Beeching’s prison cell, and Mike had evidently been following suit. It was private, in a way, between them and nobody else (except El, whom she had tried to surprise with the news, only to be informed that Mike had told her the previous day). They had spoken freely and openly there, and that was something that Max did not want word getting around that she was prepared to do with people.  


“Just decided to start again from scratch,” she said.  


“Well, whatever happened, I’m glad,” said Lucas. “I’d basically given up hope of you two ever getting over your whole feud thing. I’d been praying for some kind of peace treaty for years, and finally…”  


“You were that invested?”  


“Well. Yeah. I mean, I’d spent over a year being pulled apart between you, having to negotiate and balance and stuff, keep the peace, and it was a nightmare. I’m glad that you can do that yourself now.”  


Max frowned, because something about Lucas’s words didn’t sit entirely right with her, and she was going to say something, but before she could figure out what it would be, Mrs Sinclair’s car was pulling up beside them, Erica sitting smugly in shotgun, and the two of them lifted themselves to their feet, and climbed into the car.  


Really, it was a good thing that it was windy, Max considered to herself. This way, she could wear a coat and jumper without it looking odd. This way, the bruises on her right wrist, left by Neil that morning when she had tried to walk away while he was telling her about the new rules that her mother’s job would necessitate, weren’t visible to anyone.  


Lucas would only overreact, seeing it as a whole red line that had been breached, rather than just another aspect of Neil’s general shittiness. It was fine, really.  


Well, not fine, per se. But Max could deal with it, and that was what mattered.  


*******

**Wednesday 5th February, 1986:**  


“Do you have an identification code?”  


Joyce scrabbled through her purse, displacing receipts until she finally found the one with the right words written down on it. “Erm. Hang on. Cambric Shirt?”  


There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Please wait a moment. We’ll reconnect you.”  


After a couple of seconds, the silence was broken.  


“Joyce. Hi there,” said Sam Owens. She could not see his face, of course, but from the tone of his voice, it was not difficult to imagine what he must be looking like right now – smiling, but tired. The same as her, really. “What can I do for you today? Everything alright with the kids?”  


“Well,” said Joyce, taking one final glance around the gas station to make sure that the concourse was deserted, “it’s funny that you should say that, actually.”  


“Oh? El’s powers have come back?”  


She shook her head distractedly, then remembered that this was not a tremendously helpful thing to do in a phone conversation. “Not exactly. Owens, there’s things going on here. In Winterton. You know, the place that you told me would be absolutely safe.”  


He was silent for a couple of seconds, then spoke. “Ah. Yes, I’d wondered if something like this was going to happen.”  


“Wait, what? You knew about the damned monster possessing people in my town? You –“  


“Joyce,” said Owens, in a steadying tone. “I didn’t know any of the details beforehand. The events of January took me by surprise as well. But there was a possibility.”  


“A possibility that my children would be attacked? Well, so kind of you to warn us –“  


“I can’t be everywhere at once, Joyce,” said Owens, slightly sharper than before. “I was actually rather busy on the day in question. Had some important business on my end. Maybe your eldest might have mentioned that to you.”  


“Wait, what does Jonathan have to do with this?” asked Joyce, but – before she had even finished talking – she almost knew what the answer was going to be, as if by some kind of sixth sense.  


“Your son and Miss Wheeler,” said Owens (she could picture him rubbing his eyes), “and a friend of theirs, broke into a secure government facility in Washington over the Christmas break, whilst they were supposedly visiting some college or another. Tried to make copies of a lot of extremely secure files. I take it that he hasn’t told you about this?”  


Joyce said nothing, but Owens seemed to take her silence as answer enough.  


“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I was dealing with when your kids were being chased around Winterton, when Wheeler and Mayfield were being interrogated by Jack Beeching. Stopping your son from committing treason.”  


She felt numb, cold, and not just because of the wind blowing in from the ocean, but she tried to push it all aside, focus on her task. “Look, I’ll talk to him. I didn’t know about any of this, I swear. But, look, we’re in danger here. Can’t you do anything to help us?”  


“Do what?” said Owens. “Send soldiers into Winterton? Tell them to shoot anyone suspicious?”  


“Oh, fuck you, Owens,” said Joyce, deciding there and then that keeping a lid on her frustration and anger was not strictly necessary. “There’s got to be something you can do about this.”  


He was silent for a moment. “No. I’m not sure if there is.”  


“What the hell are you talking about?”  


“Beeching,” he only said. “I know that the Hawkins lot have been telling your kids, and I presume they’ve passed it on to you. There’s someone else out there with a stake in this.”  


She’d heard the name, but not a lot more than that, apart from the detail that he was able to and willing to kidnap children for interrogation. And she did not miss the other detail either, the one that Owens certainly could not have intended to reveal there – he had been listening in on the radio conversations, hacked Dustin’s tower somehow, and was keeping quite a careful set of notes on everything that passed between Hawkins and Winterton. “What about him?”  


“He wants El, Joyce,” said Owens. “Wheeler and Mayfield, they managed to trick him into thinking that she didn’t care about them enough to be decent hostages, but it’s not a long-term solution. If I move, he’ll move, and his move will be a heck of a lot more aggressive than mine. In all honesty, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s waiting for something. Goodness knows what.”  


“So you can’t help?” said Joyce. “That’s what you’re telling me. There’s nothing you can do to help us, to stop the fucking alien monster that keeps trying to destroy the world, because of some petty interdepartmental politics?”  


“Yeah,” said Owens. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I don’t like it any more than you do –“  


“Oh, save it,” said Joyce. “There’s people dying here. People’s minds being shattered and torn apart.”  


Owens sighed, a long and not entirely happy sigh. “Fine. Here’s what I’ll do. That Glenny man, the one who was partially infected with the contagion, I’ll get some of my guys onto the task. Work out exactly what it is we’re facing here, and do what we can to stop it. Maybe we’ll be able to develop a vaccine or an antidote eventually, one that doesn’t involve burning it out of people, and then we can roll that out across Winterton. That’s doable; that’s something under the radar that I can work on. Hopefully, Beeching will be too busy with his plans and experiments in Ansted to take much notice.”  


The anger had left Joyce now, as much as it ever did, to be replaced with a deep tiredness. “Sure. Do whatever you feel comfortable doing. Take Glenny off to a military hospital somewhere, and see if you can do a better job keeping this one secure than you did with the Lab.”  


Owens was quiet. Perhaps she’d struck a nerve. She hoped that she had.  


“Thanks for all your help,” she said, and hung up the phone.  


She should shout at Jonathan, she thought later, when she was back home again. He’d lied, for one thing, and had also committed a capital crime, although this seemed a somewhat less tangible offence after the last three years. But, as she stood outside his bedroom door, listening to the quiet snoring from within, she felt her resolve crumple in the face of her own guilt.  


He’d been trying to do something. Whatever his plan had been – or, rather, whatever Nancy’s plan had been; Joyce knew Nancy well enough to know that when she was determined to do something, there was very little that would stand in her way – he’d been trying to do something. Trying to strike a blow against the people that had been pursuing and plaguing and preying on them for the last three years, trying to do what he thought was right.  


And what about her? What was she doing?  


She was working fourteen-hour shifts every day but Sunday, that was what. She was manning the counter at a service station on the edge of town, occasionally sneaking out for a smoke or to phone a secret government operative. She was letting the world win, and backing herself into another prison.  


She was working a dead-end job in a dead-end town, as many hours as she was reasonably able to work, so that she could support three children. She was earning wages just fast enough to stay ahead of the endless daily demand of food and gas and medication. And, meanwhile, in another part of the world, the enemies were taking their time, because they could afford to.  


The men in the forest had said just as much to her. They could wait, as long as they had to, because every day that went by just strengthened their hand and made it far easier for them to take Will and El from her. Beeching could wait, as well – he had an impenetrable mountain fortress, if the third-hand information of Steve via Dustin and Will was to be believed, and enough money to run his own private army whilst still conducting experiments on the side. Perhaps he wanted El and her powers for himself in the long term, but the short term was hardly an area with any major issues for him anyway.  


Neil Hargrove could wait. Lonnie could wait. A lot of people in the world could wait for as long as they wanted, and everything would come to them eventually. There were so many of them, so many, in Hawkins and Winterton and everywhere else besides; people who didn’t need to act, didn’t need to make their move unless they really wanted to, because the status quo already worked out nicely for them.  


And Jonathan had tried to strike a blow against those people (and yes, of course Owens was one of them as well, of course Owens could wait, even if he was on the side of the angels by default). Jonathan had tried to fight back. And, Joyce realised, there was no way that she could criticise him for that. Not without the worst hypocrisy in the world.  


Which led her to one quite clear conclusion. It was time for her to start doing the same. Time to stop letting things happen to her and her family; time to stop thinking of the Mind Flayer as a hurricane to be weathered, and to start seeing it as a problem to solve. No more listening to shuddering breaths on the other end of a telephone, no more following the magnets. She would be the one who moved them from now on, by whatever means necessary.  


Joyce Byers was fighting back.  


*******

**Thursday 6th February, 1986:**  


Steve opened the door after the fifth knock, and did not look particularly pleased, to Dustin’s eyes, to see him.  


The older boy, quite frankly, was a mess. He was still wearing his uniform from the video store, despite (Dustin was fairly sure) having finished his shift at lunch that day, as well as an inside-out sweater. His face bore the clear signs of having not had nearly enough sleep in the past week or so, dark circles beneath his constantly-blinking eyes. And then there was the hair, of course – normally the best barometer of Steve’s mood and general competence, it was slumping rather forlornly across his forehead, and had clearly not known the touch of Farah Fawcett in quite some time.  


“Inside,” hissed Steve. “Quickly.”  


Dustin complied in confusion, and – as Steve slammed the door behind him – said, “What the hell is the problem with you?”  


Steve eyed Dustin with a hint of offence, but then sighed, and beckoned him through to the living room. The Harrington house was as empty as it normally was, but the telltale magazines and whisky glasses strewn around on various tables told Dustin that Steve’s parents had been in town at some point recently. Perhaps that was why he was in this state.  


Steve sat, and Dustin followed suit. From an inner pocket of his jacket, he produced a scrap of snow-white paper, folded twice and crumpled from handling.  


“Right,” said Steve, his voice hushed. “You’re not telling anyone about this, OK?”  


Dustin nodded uncertainly. There was, he thought to himself, every possibility that he would be phoning Lucas or Mike later to gossip about Steve’s love life, depending on the way this conversation went.  


“Last week,” Steve continued, “I was at the store, like, really late. Midnight or something like that. I’d fallen asleep, because it is the single dullest job in human history that doesn’t involve dressing as a sailor, and I woke up, and this piece of paper was next to me. Someone had left it for me.”  


Dustin, his interest piqued, grabbed the paper from Steve’s hands, and unfolded it, reading the regular handwriting with a growing bewilderment.  


“Three spies,” he said. “In Hawkins. With no identifying information, or anything actually useful. What kind of useless secret message is this?”  


Steve shrugged, shaking his head in disbelief. Dustin reached for his Supercomm.  


“What the hell are you doing?”  


“Getting the others over here. This is big news –“  


Steve flicked the back of Dustin’s hand. “Stop. Stop moving. You literally just said that you weren’t telling anyone about this, remember?”  


Dustin squinted in confusion at Steve. “Why not? Like, I don’t know if you’ve met the rest of the Party before, Steve, but they’re probably not going to be the spies –“  


“Yeah, no shit, Henderson,” said Steve, “but the actual spies might be watching them. Thought about that?”  


Dustin tried to look as though he had definitely thought about that. “Yeah. Obviously, Steve. But it’s not like a bunch of teenagers cycling over to your house is actually that unusual, you know, by the standards of the last two years.”  


Steve scowled slightly. “Even so. This stuff is officially need-to-know from now on. And there’s the other thing, as well…”  


Dustin listened as Steve told him, told him about the strange and graceful shadowy figure in the back of the store at midnight, the way it had moved across the darkness, the possibility that he had seen it again outside his window early yesterday morning, and mentally sighed, adding another item to the increasingly long to-do list in his brain labelled _‘Problems to Solve This Time’_.  


“Right,” said Dustin, once the story was finished. “How do we go about finding the spies?”  


Steve looked up at him from the note, a slightly wild look in his eyes. “Who says we should even do that? Like, what if that’s what they want us to do?”  


Dustin looked sympathetically across at him. “Steve. You ever read anything about espionage before?”  


“I’ve watched all the James Bond films –“  


“Yeah. It’s OK. Just take it from me, that’s probably not the case. Secret agents, as a rule, don’t call attention to their own existence, what with the whole, you know, secrecy thing.”  


Steve looked away, scowling again.  


“Here’s the question we’ve got to ask,” said Dustin. “Why three?”  


“What do you mean?”  


“If you want to secretly infiltrate somewhere, you send one person. It’s a lot less noticeable than two people arriving in the same place at once would be. So why three?”  


“Maybe it’s a big job,” said Steve. Dustin wasn’t sure if he was being entirely serious.  


“Or,” said Dustin, “maybe it’s several different people, working for several different countries. Obviously, trying to get at the secrets of the Upside-Down, since that’s the only interesting thing about Hawkins.”  


“You think it’s more Russians?” said Steve. Dustin, being polite and sensitive, did not comment on the fact that Steve’s voice sounded a fraction less steady in saying this; neither Steve nor Robin had ever actually told him in full detail what had happened to them under the mall last summer, and his imagination had worked overtime on this.  


He merely shook his head. “Why would they need spies? They were here for ages last year; they’d have found out whatever they needed then.”  


Steve nodded, and there was a hint of relief in his eyes.  


“But never mind that,” said Dustin. “What are they actually trying to do? And why would someone want to tell you?”  


“First of all,” said Steve, “I resent your implication there. That I’m somehow not going to bring anything to this situation.”  


“You have won a single fight in your entire life,” said Dustin.  


“Second of all,” said Steve, talking over him, and furrowing his eyebrows in concern, “do you think that this might be linked to the break-in at the Lab? You know, three or four weeks ago?”  


Dustin felt an unpleasant and familiar sinking feeling wash over him. “What break-in?”  


“I only just remembered,” said Steve, sounding increasingly worried himself. “When Robin and I got back from Ansted, there was a roadblock and everything – there’d been shots fired, and someone had broken into the Lab, Callahan said…”  


“Why wouldn’t you tell me about that?”  


“Because I forgot!” shouted Steve, and then blinked, as if in surprise that he had just done that. “I forgot, man, and I don’t understand why. Just talking about the spies right now brought it back to me. Why would I forget something like that?”  


Dustin was not sure quite what to say.  


“Something’s happening,” said Steve, scratching the back of his neck nervously. “In Hawkins. Mysterious notes, sure, and people in the shadows, but it’s more than that. I keep thinking…” He trailed off.  


“Keep thinking what?” said Dustin.  


Steve shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Point is, there’s creepy shit going on.”  


Dustin nodded. “You’re right. Let’s break into the Lab tonight.”  


Steve spluttered slightly, having apparently choked on thin air in surprise. “What the fuck, Henderson?”  


“Why not?”  


“I’ve got work tonight –“  


“Fine, tomorrow night, then. Gives us more time to establish a plan of operations. I’ll cycle over to Robin’s and tell her.”  


“No!” said Steve, quickly, and then, more slowly, elaborated. “No. I don’t think she really wants to be doing anything like that right now. She’s, erm, not feeling very well.”  


Dustin cocked his head and stared appraisingly at Steve.  


“Fine,” said Steve. “She tried to tell her parents about…her secret the other day. It went, like, really badly. I don’t think she’d want to play spyhunters with us. Not if anything like last time happens again.”  


Dustin nodded slightly, hearing the subtext and the fear in Steve’s words. “You don’t have to come either, you know.”  


Steve rolled his eyes. “Erm, yeah, actually, I do. Your mom would string me up if she knew that I was letting you break into top-secret bases by yourself. Besides, I’ve got practice. I’ve played this game before, you know.”  


Dustin could see the resolve on his friend’s face. “Alright. Tomorrow, then.”  


“Tomorrow,” echoed Steve, and if Dustin really tried, he could almost convince himself that there was no apprehension in his voice.  


*******

**Thursday 6th February, 1986:**  


It was always quiet in the Byers household these days, El thought to herself.  


Quieter than usual, that was. None of them were particularly loud people, apart from sometimes Joyce; it was very different to how the cabin had been, when Hop would call between rooms and yell in annoyance and play Jim Croce as loud as the speakers would let him. Here, people talked in quiet voices as a matter of habit, and even when they played music, it was a quiet backdrop rather than the centre of attention.  


But it was even quieter now. Will was avoiding her whenever he could help it, although still being polite and nice whenever she cornered him. Joyce was almost always out at work, and whenever she was at home, she looked – she remembered learning the word three months ago – deflated. Like an old birthday balloon.  


And Jonathan…  


She knocked on his door, with more than a hint of nervousness, and heard the music – the song where the man was happy and hoped you were happy too – pause. Then the door swung open, and he said, “El? Are you alright?”  


She nodded.  


“Do you want to come in?” he asked, after a couple of seconds of silence, and she nodded again, and followed him into the room. Jonathan offered her the only chair, but she shook her head, and hopped up onto the desk, sitting beside his tape deck and leaning against the wall.  


“What’s going on?” he asked, sitting down. His voice, too, seemed quieter these days, more withdrawn.  


“Will,” she said.  


Jonathan raised his eyebrows, and his face seemed to be inviting her to say more.  


“He won’t talk to me,” she said. “He keeps avoiding me. Like he’s avoiding Mike. Is he mad at me?”  


Jonathan smiled, but it was a strange smile. “He’s not mad at you, El. He’s not mad at me, either, I don’t think. But he’s avoiding me too.”  


“Why?”  


Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know. He won’t talk to me about it. I’ve got a couple of guesses what’s going on with him, but no more than that.”  


“We talked last week. About Mike. But I didn’t understand him.”  


“What do you mean?”  


El shook her head, remembering that she had promised Will not to tell anyone else about the details of their conversation. Not that it mattered too much, since she didn’t see quite what was so secret there anyway.  


“People are difficult to understand, sometimes,” said Jonathan. His voice sounded far away, even though it was actually quite close. “It’s OK. You’re not the only one that finds it difficult.”  


“But I _shouldn’t_ ,” said El, hearing the frustration in her own voice and finding herself unable to do anything about it. “We always managed before. He’s like a real brother. And anyway, I should be able to understand people now.”  


Jonathan was still looking at her as though he wanted her to keep talking, so she did.  


“It’s been two years,” she told him. “More. Two hundred days since Starcourt, four hundred since the Snow Ball, eight hundred since I escaped. I should be able to speak to people now.”  


“You’ve got friends at school,” said Jonathan. “And the Hawkins lot. You can speak to them, can’t you?”  


She tried to nod and shake her head at the same time. “Yes. But no. Not properly. Not like everyone else.”  


And now there were tears in her eyes, and she angrily brushed them away, but it was too late, because Jonathan seemed to have noticed them.  


“I can’t do anything that other people can,” she continued. “I can’t draw like Will. I can’t tell jokes like Josh. I can’t skate like Max, or build things like Dustin, or tell stories like Mike. I can’t even talk to people and understand them, not properly. Maybe I never will.”  


“Everyone’s got something that they’re good at,” said Jonathan, sympathy in his tone. “Something unique to them.”  


El could not meet his eyes. “I did once. Not any more. No good now.”  


There was a slight sigh of understanding. “Your powers?”  


She nodded. “They’re gone. Not coming back.”  


Jonathan was silent for several seconds, and then said, “But you know that that’s not who you are, right? That you’re a lot more than just that?”  


El nodded glumly. “Mike said so too. Said that he likes me whatever. But…”  


“But?”  


“But I want to help,” said El, “and I can’t.” She thought about this simple sentence for a moment, and realised that it applied more broadly than that. “I want to be able to fight the Vestige. I want to protect my friends. And I want to help Will to stop being so sad, as well. I want to be able to talk to him. But I can’t.”  


Jonathan was smiling again, a wry, rueful, smile. “I know. Me too.”  


“He won’t talk to me,” said El, and the tears were back in her eyes, “because I can’t listen properly. I can’t understand what he means. I can’t be a real friend. Can’t be a real sister.”  


And Jonathan was standing, and pulling her into a hug, as her body decided that there was no point in holding back the crying any more.  


“I just want to help,” she said, through the tears, through the emotion. “I want to help people. Stop anyone else from dying or hurting.”  


“But nobody can, El,” said Jonathan, and again, he sounded a long way away. “It’s never in anybody else’s power how someone feels. Not entirely. You can’t take responsibility for other people’s happiness. The best anyone can do is help when it’s possible, and be there when it’s not.”  


She considered this, and cried a bit more, as Jonathan continued to hold her reassuringly. Eventually, she pulled away.  


“Will’s going to come round eventually,” said Jonathan. “He’ll talk to us some day soon. When he wants to. Maybe he’ll tell us what all of this has been about.”  


El nodded. Maybe he would. And maybe her powers would just magically come back to her one day as well, and maybe Hopper would rise from the dead and her mama would speak again. Maybe.  


“We just have to keep going until then,” said Jonathan, and it sounded like he was talking to himself, or quoting from something, or something like that. And then he shook his head, as if to clear something from his eyes, and turned, reaching for something on his bedside table, and turned back to her, holding his camera.  


“Here,” said Jonathan. “Have this. If you want it.”  


She tilted her head in confusion. “Why?”  


“Because it might help,” he said. “Five, six, years ago, when Mom was divorcing Lonnie, when I was starting at middle school, I felt – well, kind of the same way that you do now. Helpless. And different to everyone else.”  


“What did the camera do?” said El.  


Jonathan’s mouth twitched slightly in an ephemeral smile. “It helped me to understand people. And gave me something to be good at, something to discover and work out and perfect by myself. I thought, maybe, you might want to do the same.”  


She stared at the camera.  


“It’s pretty easy,” said Jonathan. “Point it at something and press the button. If you look through this bit, you can see what it’s going to look like. They might not be good pictures at first, but, you know, one day, you can be as good at this as Will is at drawing. You can make this your new talent, your new thing.”  


He paused momentarily, and she could not quite think of what to say, how to accept such a gift, something that Jonathan had prized and treasured for as long as she had known him, that he was just offering to her as though it was the last waffle on the breakfast table in the morning. It was almost enough to bring tears to her eyes again, but that would have been ridiculous, because there was nothing really to be sad about here. This was different.  


This was a blanket fort or a cabin in the woods or a secret trip to the mall. This was kindness; unnecessary, unasked-for, wonderful, kindness.  


She took the camera from her brother’s hand, and hoped that her smile said everything that she could not put into words.  


“You can always start again,” he said to her. “With anything.”  


*******

**Friday 7th February, 1986:**  


Hawkins had been a strange place, cold and empty, for quite some time now.  


Robin walked through the streets of the town, and wondered to herself whether it had always been like this, and whether she’d just failed to notice, or whether the soul of Hawkins had been crushed in July when forty-eight people had inexplicably died. Probably the former, she thought. Sure, the deaths at Starcourt had made it so that nobody could ignore it any more, but the Mind Flayer had not come out of a clear blue sky that evening. There had been plenty of disappearances and deaths and heartbreaks and tragedies before that, just all sealed away in their own little bubbles so that the town as a whole could ignore it, pretend that nothing was really wrong with their little world.  


People liked being able to ignore things. And when they couldn’t – when people died beneath a mall, or when their daughter told them in clear and certain terms who she was – well, that was when the trouble started.  


She scowled. She had told herself that there would be no dwelling on the past today, and she was determined to stick to that resolution.  


She crossed the road, taking care to avoid the icy puddles. The sky was cloudless, almost sunny, but the air was freezing to the few exposed patches of skin on her face and her wrists; it had been a long winter already. On her left was Melvald’s, open but apparently uninhabited, just like the other shops along the way. Turned out that destroying the mall and killing forty-eight people beneath it didn’t exactly bring business and shoppers back to the high street, but made them go inside, hide, wait until Hawkins was a better place again. They were still waiting.  


Robin shifted her schoolbag from one shoulder to another. It was irritatingly heavy with the weight of books and expectations.  


School had been strange today as well, more so than usual. She’d run into Dustin at lunch, and he’d been weirdly cagey and evasive; she presumed that Steve had told him about her parents, and Dustin being Dustin, he had no idea how to comfort her without reference to at least one fantasy book. Five different people had fallen asleep in the math class just before lunch, which was a higher number than usual even before one took into account the fact that three of them had woken in a cold sweat with terrified expressions on their faces. Miss Lansbury, in English, had kept forgetting people’s names, despite having taught them for three years; normally, Carol would have made fun of her afterwards, but she looked distracted and drawn, and kept jumping at people’s approach.  


Deep down, she knew what was happening. Probably everyone in town did, and the ones who didn’t were just lying to themselves. Whatever had happened before was happening again. They were trapped in the lack of calm before the storm.  


She was at the junction that signalled the end of the high street now. The road on the right led home, but that did not seem tremendously appealing at the moment, so she turned left automatically, heading towards the edge of town without too much of an idea exactly where she was going to.  


Something was coming. That much was clear. It had been clear ever since her and Steve had gone to – whatever that town in the mountains was called; she should really remember this – to rescue the kids, since Dustin had called the two of them round three days later to explain how he’d been chased through the woods by a gigantic monster. And the longer the wait lasted, the worse it was surely going to be when the crisis hit.  


In front of her, a grey building loomed, and – blinking – she realised where she was. It was Benny’s, or the place that used to be called Benny’s before he had died and everything had started. The name had changed, but the place had not; it was still a standard-issue middle-American diner, with three cars outside and a faded flag in the window, and no doubt a country song on the radio. But it was cold on the street, and it would be warm in there, so she entered.  


The place was nearly deserted. There was a man staring into space behind the bar with a dishcloth in his hand, and an elderly couple wearing massive coats sitting in the far corner, quietly chattering about the President to the accompaniment of some song with more banjos than was strictly necessary. And then, near to the door, a girl around Robin’s age, who looked vaguely familiar from school; she had shoulder-length dark hair and a strangely angular face, and was nursing a large mug of hot chocolate in both of her pale hands. Without knowing entirely why, Robin made her way over to the girl’s table.  


“Hi,” she said, when the other girl looked up in surprise. “You’re in my year at school, right?”  


The other girl awkwardly nodded, smiling up at her. “Jasna. I mean, that’s me. Jasna Konstanjević. Do you want to sit down?”  


Robin gratefully slid into the chair, and let her schoolbag fall to the floor with an audible thud. “Wait, hang on. Aren’t you the person who’s moved in with Nancy Wheeler?”  


Jasna nodded again, absently. “Yep. The official story is that I’m a distant relative, so that people don’t gossip too much about the family, but, well…”  


She tailed off. Robin narrowed her eyes in confusion. “You arrived here just after Christmas. Just after Nancy and Jonathan got back from Virginia. Did you come with them?”  


“Sort of,” said Jasna. “I used to live in Washington, and, well, now I don’t.”  


“You’d give up a big city for Hawkins? You left a place with actual things happening for this?”  


“Well,” said Jasna, looking awkward again, “yeah. Hawkins doesn’t have my parents here, so, erm. That’s a plus.”  


And the pain, or the memory of pain, washed over Robin again, as she remembered her own parents. She’d managed to forget the whole situation for a good ten minutes or so there, and those were the best parts of the day.  


“So that’s the unofficial story,” said Robin, trying to smile and hoping that she would forget all about her problems again soon. “Why would you give it away to a complete stranger like this? I mean, I might go and gossip about it to all my friends now…”  


Worry abruptly flared in Jasna’s eyes. “Erm. Because I wasn’t really thinking, I guess? I mean, you seem to know Nancy, and you don’t seem too unfriendly, although of course appearances can be deceptive, and –“  


“Relax,” said Robin, feeling a genuine grin cross her face. “Your secret is safe with me. I basically only have two friends to tell, and one of them is a fifteen-year-old, so I’m not exactly the centre of the Hawkins rumour mill here.” She extended her hand across the table. “Robin. Robin Buckley.”  


Jasna took her hand, shaking it gravely. Her hands were warmer than Robin’s, but not by much. “Jasna Konstanjević. Nice to meet you.”  


“You already said your name,” pointed out Robin. She heard the door opening behind her and someone else entering, but did not turn to look.  


Jasna nodded. “Yeah, you’re right, I did, didn’t I? Sorry. I mean, hopefully now you might not forget.”  


Robin smirked again. “That wasn’t particularly likely. You’ve got the most interesting name of anyone in town by a long chalk; like twenty percent of the female population here is called Sophie Johnson or something like that.”  


Jasna, cautiously, smiled as well. “It’s Croatian. I mean, I was born in Washington, but my family’s from Croatia originally. From a place called Koprivnica, in the north of the country. My grandparents, they fled to America when the Second World War was breaking out.”  


Robin nodded. “Yeah, understandable. Not a fun time to be in Eastern Europe.”  


Jasna nodded solemnly. “It’s been noted by historians. But, anyway, what about you?”  


“What do you mean? Like, who did my family flee from in order to get to America?”  


Jasna was clearly fighting against a smile. “No. Well, yes, if there’s a story there, but I more meant, erm. Like, what’s going on with you?” She gestured, unhelpfully, with her hands in Robin’s general direction.  


“That is such a vague question,” said Robin. “It’s astonishing. It’s possibly the vaguest question I’ve ever heard.”  


“Fine,” said Jasna. “Have you lived here all your life?”  


“Yeah, pretty much,” said Robin. “Moved here when I was five. Let me tell you, Hawkins has not improved with age.”  


Jasna nodded. “Fair enough. And you know Nancy?”  


“Yeah, sort of,” Robin replied. “Not that well. We…we worked together on something last summer, ran into each other, and we’ve spoken since then, but didn’t really know each other before that.”  


“Last summer?” said Jasna, and for all her inability to keep a secret earlier in the conversation, there was something genuinely unreadable in her expression this time. “You worked together on something?”  


“Yeah,” said Robin, trying to find a good way of phrasing it. “Erm, in the old mall. Starcourt. Before it burned down, that is.”  


Jasna leaned forwards slightly, and lowered her voice. “You were there? With Nancy and Jonathan? Do you…you know what happened, then?”  


“No, no, no,” said Robin, and then realised. “Wait. Do you know?”  


Jasna’s silence and darting eyes were answer enough.  


“They told you?”  


“It was a really long drive here from Washington. We had to talk about something. So, you were there as well?”  


Robin nodded. “Yeah. Got me. I was…well, let’s say I was on the Russian end of the story, rather than the evil flesh demon side.”  


“Fun,” said Jasna.  


Robin only shook her head, and contrition crossed Jasna’s face.  


“It’s fine,” said Robin. “Just, you know, not a fun topic of conversation. Or a good one for public places.”  


Jasna nodded. “Alright. Makes sense. So, erm, school, right? What’s – what’s with that?”  


Despite herself, Robin could not contain a snort of laughter. “It sounds like you’re trying to do some really dreadful observational comedy there.”  


Jasna looked down at the table, but was smiling as well. “Any of you in the audience ever had, erm, bad teachers? Or, or, textbooks which don’t have footnotes?”  


Robin blinked in confused astonishment at the girl sitting opposite her. “You want footnotes in your textbooks?”  


“Yeah,” said Jasna, looking quite serious. “I mean, how else am I supposed to read around the subject?”  


Robin shook her head in disbelief. “Oh, brilliant. A proper bona fide nerd, come to deepest Indiana from the shining capital. I think you’re in the wrong place, Konstanjević. We don’t like intellectuals here. Ever seen _The Wicker Man_?”  


Jasna opened her mouth – hopefully with a witty response that would have revealed her deep knowledge of cult horror films, Robin thought – but was interrupted, as a hand fell onto both of their shoulders, and they looked up as one, to see Nancy Wheeler standing over them.  


“Brilliant,” she said, her tone businesslike. “You’re both here. Are you busy?”  


“Erm,” said Robin, and Nancy appeared to take this as a negative.  


“Good,” she said. “I could do with your help. Something’s happening.”  


“What do you mean?” said Jasna. “As in, something unusual, or…”  


“Yeah, that’s probably fair to say,” said Nancy. “I’ve just spoken to the owner here. He’s the fourth person that’s said the same sort of thing.”  


“What sort of thing?” said Robin.  


Nancy only shook her head, looking sombre. “Not in here. Follow me.”  


Robin, confused, found herself standing up; Jasna mirrored her movements, downing the rest of her mug of hot chocolate and coughing slightly at the bitterness. Nancy ushered them outside, back into the freezing evening air, and looked around suspiciously as they walked away from the diner.  


“Look,” said Robin, after they had been walking in silence for around half a minute, “what the hell are we actually doing? Is this actually a big real thing, or just something kind of weird? Because it was a lot warmer back inside, and I was actually having a nice evening for a change, so is this a big deal or not?”  


Nancy stopped, and turned to look at the pair of them. “Well, that depends. Would you say that the dead returning is a big deal?”  


*******

**Friday 7th February, 1986:**  


Ice covered the surface of the river beneath the bridge, and a man stood on the other side of the shallow gorge. He wore a long dark coat and a grey scarf, with the hints of a Hawaiian shirt emerging from beneath it. Cautiously, Murray took a step towards him, and the other man did the same in response. Slowly, they advanced onto the bridge, and made their way to the centre.  


“Eddie Vincenzo,” said Murray. It was not a question.  


“Marcus Taylor,” said the other man, and Murray nodded in response to his latest alias.  


“You said that you had something for me.” he said. “Something I’d want to see.”  


“Two things,” said Vincenzo. “And you said that you had something for me too. Something about Ansted.”  


Murray nodded, and brought out a folder. He had twenty copies of it back in the RV, but still pretended to handle it with care and reverence as he passed it over. Vincenzo opened the file, and flicked through the first few pages, before nodding with a calm expression.  


“Not bad,” he said. “In return, this is for you. The real story behind Operation Argus. They didn’t stop with Nekoma after all.”  


Murray nodded, keeping a steady poker face and accepting the identical brown folder from Vincenzo’s pocket.  


“And then there’s this,” said Vincenzo, brandishing a tape. “Langly and Frohike caught this on transmission, managed to record it. They said to send it to you. Said you’d be interested.”  


“Cool,” said Murray, pocketing the tape as well. “I’ll give it a listen.”  


Two hours later, after a long walk through the forest (including a short section walking down an unfrozen river), after changing one set of fake plates on the RV to another set of fake plates, after driving to a new and isolated set of logging roads, he put the tape on. It was not a familiar voice that played out of it, crackling with distance and poor-quality replication, but the words were enough for him to sit up in his seat and take notice.  


“ _To whoever is receiving this in the American government_ ,” said the calm, cold voice, “ _my name is Martin Brenner. You might remember me. I have recently escaped from captivity in the Soviet Union, and am currently taking refuge in Hong Kong. I have come into possession of information that you would be extremely interested to learn, and I am prepared to strike a deal that would see it securely in your hands, in exchange for my safe return home to America_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, thank you to all my wondrous and discerning readers for giving me the encouragement to write this - hope you're all still enjoying the story! I'm back at university now, so updates might be a little less frequent depending on what the workload's like this year, but hopefully I'll still be able to give you a new chapter every couple of weeks or so! The next chapter will be called Eye In The Sky, and things are starting to speed up again...
> 
> Please don't hesitate to leave comments - however long or short they are, they always bring a massive grin to my face, and quite frequently give me new and interesting things to think about when I'm writing! If you have any questions about the story, or anything that you're particularly enjoying, or just general observations, then I'd love to hear them!
> 
> (Also, in completely unrelated news, if you haven't read palmviolet's 'View From A Bridge' yet, then go and do that - it's brilliant, and just the sort of thing that you'd probably like if you enjoy this style of long, complex, Season-4-ish story! Here's a link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26565298/chapters/64762783.)


	10. Eye In The Sky

They hadn’t been ready.  


It had been an ordinary day at the school – a Friday, so it was quiet in the afternoon, at the point when the overworked teachers had largely given up trying to find new pieces of knowledge to put into the heads of their charges, and had settled for counting down the minutes until the weekend. Will had tried to stay focused, he really had, but it had been a long week, and so he spent most of his English class sketching idly in the margins of his notepad, having finished _Bleak House_ quite some time ago. And finally the bell had gone, and he’d left the classroom with a sense of relief, heading towards the lockers where he met up with El and Josh, who had been complaining vociferously to each other about their math teacher. Maria had joined them a couple of minutes later from the direction of the library, clutching an alarmingly-sized book with a snarling cat on the front cover, and the four of them had wandered towards the exit.  


They should have noticed the hushed quiet outside the door, the emptiness of the parking lot in the grey evening darkness. They should have realised that something was amiss in the deserted playground, or on the street beyond it, where no cars were driving despite the hour. But the silence was subtle and surreptitious, not particularly noticeable, and in any case, they were talking to one another about whatever crossed their minds.  


And, as they stepped onto the sidewalk on the other side of the road, they had seen – almost as one – a solitary figure standing in the shadows beside the streetlight, clearly facing them, and Will had felt the dread rise in the back of his stomach, and by then it was too late.  


They had turned, and tried to run, and seen three more figures standing behind them, walking on silent feet along the middle of the road, their eyes hollow and their faces utterly serene. And now two more were emerging from the school, and another from a side-street, and they were surrounded, and there was nowhere to hide.  


“Stay back,” Will called to them, hoping that his thin voice would somehow reach the ears of a non-possessed bystander, somebody who could come to their defence. “Seriously. We’re not afraid to fight this time.”  


The figures laughed, but not in unison; rather, they traded the laughter back and forth between one another, like a game of pass-the-parcel, and it seemed to create a wall around the four children.  


“Nor are we,” said one of them, tilting its head as it spoke. Will did not think it really mattered which one.  


“We’re armed,” said Maria. “We’ve been preparing for this. We know how to hurt you. And believe me, I’d be very happy to do just that, considering what you did to my father.”  


Another spoke. “He is lucky. He is halfway to joining Us. All should wish for this blessing.”  


“We don’t want your blessing,” said Josh, in a tone that Will assumed was intended to be defiant. “We want you to just leave us alone. Back away, and nobody has to get hurt.”  


“But we need you,” said another. “With your memories, we can become Us again, and we will bestride the world and make it beautiful.”  


El took one step forward, towards the one that had been waiting for them under the streetlight, and Will almost called out to her to stay as far from them as possible, but he held his tongue, knowing somehow that it was only their apparent strength and unity that held the Vestige, however temporarily, at bay.  


“It’s our world,” she said, her voice low and certain, and – in a single, practiced, motion – she drew a lighter from her pocket and a can of hairspray from her satchel of schoolbooks, and opened fire on the figure standing there.  


A jet of flame leapt across the gap between them, and the hollow-eyed man flinched back, an automatic reflex action, lifting his hand to shield his face from the burning light, and that was all the time they needed. As the fire was still melting away, they began to run, into the gap that had suddenly formed in the circle around them, Maria swinging the hardback book in her hand at the cowering man and catching him sharply in the neck as they passed him. And then they were running, the four of them, with no good idea of where to go; El darted down a side-street, and the others followed. And Will turned round, checking that Josh was there too, and saw – to his confusion – that the Vestige was not chasing them at all. The figures were still standing there, and it was a couple of seconds before he realised why this must be.  


“Stop –“ he began to shout, but it was too late, because – as the silhouettes of three more people emerged in front of them from the shadows – it was quite clear that the Vestige had anticipated their moves. They skidded to a halt, and turned, to see that the way back was blocked as well by the ones from outside the school.  


Josh hurled a stone from the floor, and it struck one of the silhouettes with unerring accuracy in the forehead, but it barely staggered at all before taking a calm step forward, flanked by its two companions. Maria followed suit, with a similar lack of effect, whilst Will drew his own lighter, and readied himself to shoot another gust of flames at them. But they were standing too far apart for him to hit all of them with one shot, and they were smiling at him as if they knew what he was about to do, and in the half-second of hesitation, in the time it took to blink and consider one more time, the situation changed.  


The door to one of the houses beside them swung open, bathing the street in yellow light, and an old woman wearing a red apron stepped out, confusion on her face. Josh moved towards her, waving his hands as if she was a recalcitrant chicken, seemingly trying to herd her back inside.  


“Mrs Malcolm,” he said, worry lacing his words, “it’s not safe out here – you have to go back inside now –“  


And he abruptly stopped talking, because a carving knife was at his throat, and he was being pulled with unearthly strength into an armlock, and the woman’s hollow eyes gleamed with alien triumph.  


“It’s over, children,” said one of the people behind them.  


“Not yet,” said El, and Will saw her, out of the corner of his eyes, shakily raising her hands towards them, and – as one – the footsoldiers of the Vestige took a nervous step back. And El was whispering, now, whispering some kind of incantation under her breath, faster and faster.  


“Papa,” she hissed, through gritted teeth. “The tank, the monster, the bad men. Billy and Troy and Neil and you. Hopper, Hopper, Hopper…”  


And, as she repeated it, again and again, Will saw a single drop of blood pooling in the corner of her eye, and beginning to run down across her face. And then, all at once, the lights in the house behind them, and the streetlights all along the road, shattered, bursting and detonating in a deafening crash of glass and metal, and a wave of white light followed a second later by a wave of darkness spread across the street, and El collapsed, sinking to the floor like a doll.  


“You’ve failed, children,” said the woman holding Josh, tilting her head. “You’ve got no weapons left.”  


“We need you, Will Byers,” said one of the people in the shadows behind him.  


“We need the memories,” said another. “We need to remember being Us. We need to know who we are.”  


“You will submit,” said another. “Or we will stab your friend in the throat until he dies, and then we will do the same to your other friend, and then we will keep finding people in this town until you submit.”  


And a freezing, cold, despair washed over Will, as he looked around him – at Josh, at the still body of El, at Maria crouching next to his sister and holding her head off the tarmac, and at the people, the Vestige. And, he realised, there was only really one thing that he could do in this situation.  


“Seriously,” said Josh. His voice sounded strange; he was not moving his jaw any more than he had to, with the knife resting delicately against it. “You’d better not do that, Byers.”  


“They’ll kill you,” said Will, his voice quiet. “Unless I give them the memories.”  


“Oh, and then I guess we’ll just go our separate ways,” said Josh. His face was as white as plasterboard. “They’ll just, they’ll just, let us wander off, and maybe, erm, send you a box of chocolates afterwards to say thanks. Come on. Get real here.”  


Will, not entirely by conscious decision, felt his head shaking. “I can’t. I can’t just stand here and watch them kill you –“  


“Will!” said Josh, sharply, his voice tight, his fists clenched at his sides. “Come on! Don’t do this – don’t let them do this –“  


But he fell silent, pain on his face, along with the rest of the street, as Will – quite calmly – stepped forward, and sank to his knees.  


“You can have them,” he said. “All of my memories of him. Everything you want. Just let him go. Let us go.”  


The Vestige said nothing in reply.  


One of the hollow-eyed men, silent and solemn, stepped towards him as well, lifting his hands to the level of Will’s head. And then – he was no more than a couple of feet away from Will now – he stopped, and turned his head slightly, quizzically, as if listening to something. And then Will heard it too, louder and louder, moving towards them – the sound of electric guitars and drums and screaming – and, suddenly, there were headlights shining across the whole street, silent no longer, and the man who had been advancing on Will crumpled and fell, with the crack of a gun sounding as he did.  


“Get in!” shouted a deep voice, a second before another shot rang out, but Will was not focusing on that, but on Josh, and he saw – to his confused surprise – a tall, pointy-headed figure leaping towards the old woman, and punching her in the face, causing her to drop the knife. Josh shook himself free, and ran towards them, as Maria lifted El off the floor by her shoulders; Will grabbed her legs and helped her to lift, and they turned towards the lights, seeing a well-built man silhouetted against them, beckoning them with one hand, and aiming a gun with the other. The electric guitars had not stopped, but had – if anything – got louder and more urgent.  


The soldiers of the Vestige were rushing towards them now, in perfect lockstep with one another, and the three of them staggered away, in the direction of the lights, Josh helping to carry El’s unconscious body too. And then the person who had punched Mrs Malcolm was stepping between them and the Vestige, brandishing a golf club, and swinging it with great relish into the heads of the enemies, and then they were there, a massive truck looming up in front of them, and the well-built man standing a calm guard in front of it as he fired into the horde as well.  


“Get in,” he said again, his voice steady, and they obeyed, climbing into the open doors of the truck. A few seconds later, he was there too, sliding through the hole where the windscreen should have been, as the battle raged outside, the pointy-headed man (no, thought Will, it was hair, not his head) darting around and dodging the blows of the Vestige, and slowly, surely, fighting his way towards the other side of the throng, turning their attention away. And the truck shuddered to life as the man turned the keys, and shot backwards along the once-quiet residential street, spinning at the junction and accelerating just as alarmingly quickly out of Winterton. The man absently pressed a button on the dashboard, and the loud music abruptly ceased.  


“Oh, god,” said Will. “Thank you – you saved our lives –“  


“Well, that was the aim,” said the man. His voice was warm, calming. “Couldn’t have them harming Miss Jane, could we, now? Or any of you, indeed.”  


Maria blinked. “You – you know her?”  


“I do,” said the man in the driving seat. “We met once before, just over a year ago, a long way away. Name’s John Ezekiel Ingham, although she’d know me a lot better as Funshine, for reasons which are far too long and complicated to go into now.”  


Nobody said anything. They were too busy recovering.  


“We’re safe for now, don’t worry,” said Funshine, appearing to guess the reason for their silence. “My friend should lead them a merry chase for the next hour or so, if we’re fortunate. Now, where can I take you?”  


“Home,” said Will, his throat dry in the cold evening air. El was slumped across the three of them, unconscious but breathing; Josh, pressed up between him and the window, was staring blankly out into the darkness and blinking repeatedly, his hands trembling, just like they had done on that first day back in November. Maria seemed the most put-together of any of them, and her knuckles were white, as she clutched onto the back of the passenger seat.  


“Home it is,” said Funshine, affably, and swung the truck round a corner at worrying speeds, turning it towards the Byers house.  


*******

“The dead returning?” said Jasna, staring in blank incomprehension at Nancy. “As in – as in zombies? Walking corpses?”  


Nancy shook her head, and began to walk again, hoping that the other two would follow her. They did. “Not zombies. Ghosts, more like. People have been seeing them, occasionally – normally just flashes of the image, but sometimes for longer periods of time, for entire minutes. The guy back there at the bar said he’d seen Benny Hammond a couple of nights ago, polishing a glass behind the counter, and Benny disappeared the moment he stepped into the room.”  


“And, what, you’ve just been walking into people’s houses and saying, ‘Excuse me, have you encountered the spirit realm recently?’” asked Robin. “I mean, I’m all for people getting to know their neighbours –“  


Nancy cut her off. Robin’s sarcastic tone was not helping her right at the moment. “I’ve been impersonating a reporter from the Hawkins Post. It doesn’t matter. The point is, there’s fucking ghosts in town, Buckley.”  


“Alright,” said Robin, shrugging. “It’s an interesting turn of events, I’ll give you that. But what are we doing here? What are you planning to do about it?”  


“Well, we’re hunting the ghosts, obviously,” said Jasna, whose voice became quieter as the other two girls turned to look at her. “Sorry. Like, you know. The film. Erm. Where they hunt the ghosts.”  


“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” muttered Robin. Her tone seemed a lot less combative, more playful, when she was making fun of Jasna, Nancy noticed. “Every day. This is what I have to deal with at the video store every day.”  


Nancy closed her eyes for a second. “Would you two concentrate? We’ve got work to do.”  


“What work?” said Robin. “What’s the plan here?”  


“We’re figuring out what the hell is going on,” said Nancy, hoping that the confidence in her tone would conceal the fact that she was improvising wildly at this point as well.  


They did not have to walk far before they reached the house, still neat and pristine despite its emptiness. Nancy stopped, and the other two stopped with her, staring up at the imposing bulk of the shadowed building as it towered over them, and then – slowly, cautiously, she eased the front gate open, and stepped over an invisible threshold into the garden.  


“Whose house is this?” asked Jasna.  


Robin answered before Nancy could, her voice quiet. “Nobody’s. At least, not any more.”  


“A family called the Holloways used to live here,” said Nancy. “Until last summer. The Mind Flayer got all three of them, killed them and possessed them and used them to kill other people.” A part of her was impressed that she’d managed to keep her voice calm and steady. “If anywhere’s going to have ghosts, then it’s here.”  


Jasna nodded. “Makes sense. Is it just me, or does it feel…colder here?”  


Robin shrugged. “Maybe. Don’t think so. I think that’s just the whole town, nowadays, whenever anyone thinks about it.”  


“You mean winter?”  


“No,” said Robin. Her voice had lost its usual sarcasm; it was graver now, darker. “Not just that. It’s…”  


She trailed off, and shuffled her feet in the mud of the Holloways’ front lawn.  


Nancy stared at the house again. It stared back.  


“I’m going in,” she said, softly. “You two don’t have to come. You can turn back –“  


“You did this whole speech back at Longbow House,” said Jasna. “It didn’t stop me then.”  


“Yeah,” said Nancy, “and, you know, then you read a bunch of horrifying torture records and ran away from home. I won’t mind if you don’t want that again.”  


“Then why exactly did you bring us here?” asked Robin. “We didn’t know about any of this before you stumbled across us in the diner. You presumably dragged us along for a reason.”  


Nancy said nothing for a moment, and then said, “I wanted you to know about this. For your own safety.”  


“Oh, our own safety in the haunted house?” said Robin. “Yeah, we were clearly the people to come to, what with all of our experience with ghosts; why us?”  


“Because that’s how it works,” said Nancy, and her tone was harder now – not entirely deliberately – as she turned to stare at the other girl. “That’s the deal with this whole thing. When you learn the truth about Hawkins, you can’t opt out, you can’t run away. You’ve got to be the one to deal with it, because nobody else in the whole fucking world is inclined to help us.”  


“I see,” said Robin, her tone matching Nancy’s. “I’ve been conscripted. I didn’t actually choose to be kidnapped and tortured by Russians, you know, and I didn’t realise at the time that it came with a career for life –“  


“For God’s sake,” hissed Nancy, “I thought you’d maybe take this seriously, you know, unlike everything else in your life.” Robin’s eyes widened, and she opened her mouth, but Nancy continued. “We’ve been attacked three times. We might not survive a fourth, and it’s starting right now, probably. So either go, head off home, or do something to help.”  


“Guys,” said Jasna, quietly. Nobody paid her any attention.  


“Wow,” said Robin. “Really, wow. You really do know how to get the troops onside, General Wheeler, don’t you?”  


“Seriously,” said Nancy, “can’t you see that this is important? Ghosts, here?”  


Robin, slowly, shook her head. “Honestly? I’d be surprised if they were anywhere else. But this town’s been haunted for a long time. Surprised it took everyone else this long to notice.”  


“Guys,” repeated Jasna. “This would be a really good time to listen to me.”  


Nancy absently filed this for later. “Robin. Look. You want the truth? I think the children, our families, the whole town, is in danger. And I really need your help here.”  


Robin met her eyes. “Yeah. I know. And here I am. Just don’t expect me to be thrilled at the opportunity, because I almost died last time.”  


A harsh rejoinder sprang to the front of Nancy’s mouth – something about how everyone in Hawkins was fairly likely to die if they didn’t get on with the task at hand – but she swallowed it, because she could see it, now: the fear in Robin’s eyes, covered by a thin veneer of sardonic confidence. Instead, she said, in a softer voice, “Yeah. Me too. And the other two as well. If it helps, it gets a bit easier.”  


Robin smiled a smile without any humour whatsoever. “Well, that’s a relief.”  


“You can go, if you want,” said Nancy. “Seriously. I actually mean it. But I’d really appreciate having people by my side. It helps.”  


Robin looked at her again, and nodded, and then jumped half-out of her skin, because Jasna had grabbed her arm to get her attention.  


“Again,” said Jasna, “you seriously need to listen, guys.”  


“What is it?” said Nancy.  


“I don’t want to alarm everyone,” said Jasna, calmly, possibly too calmly, “but I think you should both look at the window.”  


They turned, as one.  


There was a pale, blank face staring back at them.  


*******

“Sit up straight, Maxine.”  


Max sighed, and pulled her body up into what she hoped would be an obviously-exaggerated posture, staring rigidly ahead of her and laying her arms flat on the dinner table at right-angles to her body. Irritatingly, Neil did not seem to notice that she was exaggerating this, but instead nodded in satisfaction.  


“Max,” said her mother, in a calmer tone, “why don’t you tell us about school today? Any news?”  


Max shrugged. “Not really. There was a history test.”  


“And how did it go?” asked her mother. She sounded, Max realised, like she was reading lines off a script, like she was deliberately playing the role of ‘Caring Mother’ in some soap opera or something like that. Not asking out of interest, but because it was the thing to say at this point in the conversation.  


“Fine,” she said, because that was her line. “Results come back on Tuesday.”  


“Well, I’m sure you’ll do fine,” said her mother. “You’ve been studying awfully hard recently, after all. We’re both very proud, aren’t we, Neil?”  


Neil stared levelly at his wife. “It’s not exactly like history’s useful for her to learn, Susan. It’s all happened by now. And anyway, they don’t teach the important stuff – Presidents and wars – in schools these days. It’s all hippy nonsense about culture and people power.”  


Max tried not to roll her eyes.  


“The point is,” said her mother, valiantly, “that we’ve been very impressed with your work ethic over the last year or so. Those new friends of yours here have clearly been a good influence.”  


Max opened her mouth, ready to make a point about how she was perfectly capable of making her own decision to start working a bit harder at school, and how she didn’t need the benevolent persuasion of a bunch of male nerds, but Neil pre-empted her.  


“Really, Susan?” he said, contempt lacing each word. “A good influence on Maxine? Is that what you think?”  


“I –“ she began, but her husband continued speaking nonetheless.  


“Those three boys are failures,” he said, flatly. “They’re the bottom of the barrel, the runts of this little backwater of a town. No physical strength whatsoever, no will, no drive to succeed. We had a couple of kids like that in our platoon back in Vietnam, and do you want to guess how long they lasted?”  


Susan said nothing, which was evidently the response Neil had been hoping for. Max bit her lip, and tried not to say anything either, since any response would not be particularly diplomatic.  


“Exactly,” he said. “They didn’t last two minutes when there was a real enemy out there. Those boys are soft, that’s the only word for it, soft in the way that this country lets people be these days. But when there’s another war, they’ll be the first to go, and let me tell you, nothing of value will be lost. Life’s about the survival of the fittest, and Maxine here has chosen to associate with the weakest instead. Sure, Susan. I’m real proud.”  


Silence fell, and then Max – only half-aware that she was doing it, since most of her brain was hissing and bubbling like a boiling kettle – began to clap, slowly, sarcastically. Neil looked at her in disbelief, his face beginning to grow red, but she had no plans of stopping.  


“Good speech, Neil,” she said, letting the derision show. “Very smart. You know, next time, maybe you should just go the whole way and tell me that I’m worthless too, in this great struggle for survival. I mean, it’s already implicit, so we might as well actually say it, right?”  


Neil’s face was redder than the ketchup smeared across his plate. “Maxine, you know full well that if you take that sort of disrespectful tone with me –“  


“Then what?” said Max. “You’ll beat me up? Like you did to Billy?”  


A shocked hush descended across the room. Max’s glance flicked to her mother’s face, and saw without surprise that her lips were firmly pursed together, her eyes looking anywhere but at the two other people sitting around the table.  


An eerie tranquility had descended over Neil from somewhere, and – silently – he stood up from his chair, and stared down at her. She tried to tell herself not to be scared, that he would sense it, and she almost convinced herself.  


“Unacceptable,” he said, eventually, in a low voice. “Families rely on discipline, Maxine, if they’re to keep their order. You should have learnt this by now. There are rules, and when they are broken, there is punishment. For your own good.”  


He took a step towards her, and suddenly, something changed in his expression, and he blinked, and turned away. He took a glass from the cupboard, filled it with water from the tap, and began to sip at it, calmly.  


Max stared at her mother in confusion, but she seemed to have no better idea of what was going on, judging by the look on her face. It was the look of someone whose house had just had a bomb dropped on it, which had then failed to explode and had rolled harmlessly away.  


“Neil?” she said, tentatively.  


Neil turned his head towards her. “Hmm?”  


“Are you – are you alright?”  


“Obviously, Susan,” he said, curtly. “What do you want?”  


Max decided that there was a time and a place for working out what had just happened, and this was neither. “I just asked whether I could leave the table. I’ve got homework to do.”  


“Yes, fine,” said Neil, absently, as though his mind was somewhere else for the moment, and she stood up, took her plate to the sink, and left the room, as fast as she could plausibly go whilst still walking, knowing that this strange amnesia could not keep her safe forever.  


She did not stay in the house for much longer after this, climbing out of her window for what must have been the hundredth time or more, and making her way through the backyard and over the fence to the road on the other side. From there, it was a five-minute walk to the nearest payphone, which seemed significantly easier than making her way all the way up to the hill (which she resolutely refused to call Weathertop) to use the radio tower. But there was no reply when she dialled the number she’d memorised back in September for the Byers house, only the tones of a cheap answering machine inviting her to leave a message so that Joyce could get back to her.  


“Erm,” said Max. “Hi. It’s Max here. I was just –“ her courage dropped out – “wanting to talk to El. Erm, about a new album. And about Mike, and how he’s still pining over Will not talking to him. Oh, erm, sorry, Will, if you’re listening to this. But it’s fine, I’ll call back another time.”  


She went to replace the phone in its cradle, and then shook her head, returning it to her ear as she gritted her teeth, forcing herself to say the real reason for the call.  


“And, also, Mrs Byers? Joyce? Something kind of bad happened with Neil at dinner today, and I kind of wanted to talk to you about it. So, erm, bye.”  


She hung up. She had no idea quite what else she was supposed to say. But going back home was definitely not an option at this stage of the evening – for all she knew, Neil had remembered by now, and was waiting in the darkness of her bedroom for her to return – so she shook her head again, and began to walk in the direction of Lucas’s house.  


She was almost there when a shape emerged from round the corner, and sped towards her along the road, and she was frozen to the spot, unable to spring out of the way, as it bore down on her, and just as she was readying herself to fight it somehow, it skidded to a halt, and a torch on its front flicked on to reveal that it was just Lucas on his bike, riding without any lights for some reason.  


“Max!” he said, slightly out of breath. “What the hell are you doing here?”  


She stared back at him, masking the fear and relief with a generous coating of irritation. “What are you doing here?”  


“Heading to yours,” Lucas explained, in an infuriatingly reasonable tone. “I needed to warn you.”  


“Well, you’ve found me,” said Max. “Warn me what?”  


“The monster,” said Lucas. “It’ll be here tomorrow.”  


*******

They broke through after six hours.  


Kali had been half-asleep when it had happened, napping in the passenger seat of the spyplane to try and recover her strength after the fight at Ozerov’s base, but the dizzying feeling of falling woke her up. She stared out of the cockpit, and saw – the sight raising hairs all over her body – that they had managed to break free of the dark ash-filled clouds, with nothing else between them and the stars, and she could not tear her eyes away from them.  


“Oh, you’ve noticed?” said Nikolay, quietly, from beside her. It was the first thing he had said since they had taken off.  


Kali nodded. “What are they?”  


“Holes,” Nikolay only said.  


And he was right. There were no stars here – that would have been far too simple, far too straightforward. That would not have fitted with the Shadow World that Kali had come to know over the past few weeks. No, there were holes in the night, gaps and tears in the fabric of the grey sky, ruptures in the heavens, and light slowly spilled through them.  


It was hard to put one’s finger one, at first, the difference between the stars of Earth and their counterparts. It was not a matter of positioning – although, for all Kali knew, the constellations of Earth were completely different; the backstreets of Chicago had not been brilliant for astronomy – nor was it anything to do with their size. Perhaps the colour was different; whilst these holes in the sky shone with a white light, it was the colour of bleached bone more than anything else, and Kali’s eyes were beginning to ache the longer she looked upwards into their stares. Perhaps it was the way that the movement of the plane left them behind, rather than them remaining static at optical infinity. But no, that was not the main thing. They emanated a feeling of wrongness, and if she concentrated, she could see the hairline fractures between them, the lines spreading out from each star, and she could almost understand why Ozerov had been talking the way he had been.  


“What does it mean?” said Kali.  


Nikolay shrugged. He had not taken his hands off the controls in the last six hours, Kali noticed, as though he was prepared – despite the autopilot and the automatic failsafes – for the plane to fall out of the air at any minute, and she could not entirely blame him. Every few seconds now, without the shelter of the ashcloud, the plane dropped several feet or was flung leisurely to the side, like constant and malevolent turbulence. The thought briefly crossed Kali’s mind that this was somehow coming from the stars-that-were-not-stars, but she dismissed it, because even if that were the case, it would not help them to know that the entire cosmos of the Shadow World was conspiring against them.  


They flew on in silence for another fifteen minutes. Looking down, Kali was fairly sure that she could make out land, hills rising and falling, something more than just the flat expanses of water she had seen from the window of the plane on the way to Russia in the first place.  


“I’ll tell you what it means,” Nikolay eventually said. “It means that we were wrong about this place.”  


“Oh?” said Kali. Truthfully, she did not entirely care, but it was good to hear someone else’s voice, to remind herself that she was not the only person in this world.  


“The scientists, back at Klyuchi,” said Nikolay, and his voice sounded older, “they said that this place was a simple parallel universe.”  


“Get them ten to the dollar at Walmart,” said Kali.  


Nikolay ignored her. “They said that this was an exact mirror of our universe – well, not exact, we don’t have Flower-Sharks, but you get the picture. This universe would have an Earth of its own, and everything else besides. And they were right about the first one; there’s a planet here that we were able to get to, rather than just plummeting into a neverending void when we stepped through the Gate, and it even looks like ours from the air. The continents are the same shape; there’s even cities and buildings in common. Gorikhin was working on some kind of statistical quantum theory to try and explain this before he – before he died. But the stars…”  


Kali blinked in incomprehension.  


“Don’t you see?” said Nikolay. “It’s only the Earth that’s the same. Everything outside the bounds of this planet is different. There’s no sun – I’d assumed it was just hidden behind the clouds all day, but it should be midday right now, and there’s no sign of it. There’s no sign of a moon either. And the stars aren’t really stars, they’re holes in the sky, empty spaces in the fabric of space itself. This isn’t our universe.”  


“Well, yeah,” said Kali. “I thought that was kind of obvious.”  


“No,” said Nikolay. “I’m not making myself clear. We’re not in a universe. We’re in some kind of insane bubble, on the inside, and it’s a lot smaller than it should be. The Shadow World consists only of Earth, and nothing else. And that doesn’t make any sense. We’re not the centre of creation, back in reality. If Earth exists, then so should the Sun, so should Jupiter, so should the constellation of Ursa Minor. But they don’t, and we do.”  


And a shiver crept up her spine as she realised – both the nonsense of their situation, and what this might mean for them, trapped in a dimension that resolutely refused to play by the laws of physics.  


“There’s got to be a reason for this,” muttered Nikolay, but he seemed to be talking to himself more than anyone else, as he stared firmly forwards, trying (just as she was trying) not to look too hard at the holes in the sky, for fear that something would look back through at them.  


They flew on. The turbulence did not stop, and seemed to be forcing them downwards, although the altimeter in the cockpit was very little help here, informing them that they were flying at a steady height of zero metres above the ground. At one point, Kali thought that she saw a pyramid beneath her, and pointed it out to Nikolay, but he only chuckled under his breath, utterly devoid of humour.  


“What is it?” she said. “If you’re taking us via Egypt instead, then I swear to God –“  


“It’s not Egypt,” said Nikolay. “No pharaohs behind that. Just the military forces of the good old USA.”  


“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”  


“That’s Nekoma,” said Nikolay. “North Dakota. A massive installation built in the middle of nowhere, part of this thing called Operation Argus, as a place to detect incoming nuclear strikes from. That’s the official story, at least; unofficially, I’ve heard tell that there’s a massive network of bunkers and tunnels beneath it, able to function as a command centre for the army when a nuclear war does break out. Just what I’ve heard.”  


“Oh,” said Kali, “you were spying there, I take it?”  


“What? No, no. I read about it in a newspaper once.”  


She could not tell whether he was being sincere or not.  


“They had me stationed over in Michigan,” Nikolay continued. “Spying on something that definitely wasn’t jet fighters, whatever Beeching thought. They sent me out here in 1983 –”  


She didn’t care any more, didn’t care about the international politics and intrigue. Nikolay continued talking, telling her about the manoeuvres and strategies, about how the Soviets had smuggled him into the US with a fake Danish passport and a cover story, about his friends who were probably double agents, and she closed her eyes again, tried to fall back asleep. Because it wasn’t important here, and truth be told, it had never been important for her anyway. She was no citizen of the USA, taken by its scientists and hunted by its soldiers. She was just as much an enemy of the state as the man flying the Russian spyplane next to her was.  


Just before sleep took her, she thought she saw a woman’s face.  


*******

Once upon a time, Steve thought ruefully, he’d have been a lot more respectful of barbed-wire fences.  


Dustin appeared to have no such reservations, and gleefully set to work with the wire-cutters he’d liberated from his mother’s garage earlier that evening, carefully snipping the strands of metal to make a hole large enough to crawl through. Somewhere in the distance – and yet a lot closer than seemed entirely comfortable – the Lab stood silhouetted against the moonlit sky, a great monolith of darkness.  


“Right,” said Dustin, as close to whispering as he was ever going to get. “This’ll do. You’re going first.”  


“I don’t want to go first,” protested Steve, automatically. “Is this even a big enough hole for a human being to get through?”  


Dustin was presumably rolling his eyes, although it was too dark to tell. “Steve, trust me on this. I know you don’t want to get your precious hair messed up, but –“  


“Oh, fuck you, Henderson,” said Steve. “I’m just concerned, you know, about the sharp metal spikes sticking out of this fence.”  


“Why?” said Dustin, seeming honestly perplexed. “They’re not going to kill you, Steve. Haven’t you ever got a paper-cut before?”  


“No, because I’m not rubbing books against my face like you weird nerds,” said Steve. “And I just don’t want to get cut, because I don’t want them getting my blood. They might have bloodhounds, man, and then we’ve got no way of denying it.”  


Dustin nodded in comprehension, and Steve mentally punched the air. Winning an argument with Dustin was a rare enough occasion that it needed to be treasured.  


“If we hear barking, we run,” said Dustin. “I can navigate back to your car using the stars if I have to.”  


“You’re so full of shit,” sighed Steve, as he begrudgingly sank to his knees, and began to wriggle through the hole, taking care to avoid the wire. “I know for a fact that you can’t actually do that. And, anyway, they’ll just bring the bloodhounds to school the next day, and then you’ll be screwed.”  


“Erm, what?” said Dustin, following him with significantly more grace.  


“The bloodhounds. If they’ve got a sample of your blood, they can sniff you out for the rest of your life. That’s why they’re called bloodhounds, dumbass.”  


Dustin looked pityingly at him. “Steve, that’s just not true. Bloodhounds can’t smell the blood in your veins.”  


“Pretty sure they can,” insisted Steve. “That’s why the cops have them. Or they’ll just, I don’t know, make everyone in school have a blood test, and then sequence the DNA or whatever.”  


Dustin was shaking his head again, and Steve just knew that he was going to say something about the practical limits on DNA sequencing.  


“Look,” said Steve, to forestall this. “I’m just saying, we need to be cautious. We’ve just broken into a government site.”  


Dustin shrugged, and started to make his way towards the Lab. “Yeah, but come on, we do that every year.”  


Steve followed, and tried as hard as he could not to voice the thought that Dustin was being far too cavalier about everything, because he knew that it would not help. All that he could do was keep guard, and hope that Dustin was right, like he was right about everything else.  


They emerged from the woods onto a flat expanse of tarmac, and suddenly, Steve realised exactly where they were – the parking lot right by the front entrance, where he’d arrived almost too late to save anyone back in November 1984. No, he corrected himself – he had been too late. The computer guy, Bob, he’d died, and Steve had never asked anyone who was there whether he might have survived if he’d just been a bit earlier, because he didn’t want to hear the answer.  


Dustin, apparently not thinking about this, was donning a balaclava, and reluctantly, Steve did the same. They’d been fairly sure, when they were planning this little trip, that none of the cameras here would work anyway; according to Mike, Nancy had been up to the Lab several times since 1984, just to check that the Department of Energy (and again, Steve wondered exactly what power stations had to do with any of this) had actually withdrawn, as they’d promised, and had never seen anyone. But there was no sense in taking risks, Steve thought, and bitterly appreciated the irony as he walked towards the building where people had been tortured and killed.  


He felt Dustin’s elbow digging into his side.  


“What?” he hissed.  


Dustin rolled his eyes beneath his balaclava, putting his finger theatrically to his lips, and then pointed. Steve followed his arm, and saw it as well – one of the windows, several feet to the right of the main entrance, and tucked back from the parking lot slightly, was broken. Silently, they moved towards it.  


It was no accident, that was clear; the glass had been almost entirely removed from the frame, and was lying in fragments on the ground beneath their feet. Steve fumbled the flashlight from his pocket, and clicked it on, shining it through the gap; on the other side, a long corridor stretched off into the distance.  


Dustin gestured frantically with his hands. Steve blinked in incomprehension, and Dustin repeated the action, linking his fingers together and then lifting his hands to his face.  


“Look, man, I don’t know what you’re doing,” whispered Steve. “I don’t know what you’re – what you’re trying to convey here –“  


Dustin shushed him, and repeated the action once again, almost insultingly slowly, and realisation dawned on Steve; Dustin wanted to be lifted through the window. He shook his head emphatically.  


Steve could see the frustration and the desire to remain silent warring in Dustin’s eyes, and the former won out. “Steve, come on. Someone else has clearly been here before us. We need to go and see what’s happening.”  


Steve sarcastically put his finger to his lips, and when Dustin flipped him off, he shook his head again. “Not happening. We’ve gone far enough tonight. We’re not prepared for actually going inside if there’s spies or Russians or whatever in there.”  


Dustin stared back at him, his face combative. “This is urgent, Steve. We don’t have time to go home for the night every time we find something out. There’s spies in Hawkins, and a big flesh-eating Manticore heading our way, and probably the Mind Flayer somewhere as well. We’ve got to act fast.”  


“Look,” said Steve, trying to place himself between Dustin and the window, “I’m not letting you go in there. It’s not even remotely fucking safe, man, and if you die, then your mother is going to make me wish I’d been killed as well. Hell, if you die and I can’t save you, then I’ll do the wishing myself. Now, come on.”  


Dustin’s eyes were unreadable, but he turned as if to go, and – just as Steve breathed a sigh of relief – the younger boy spun back around, and leapt, grabbing the frame and hauling himself inelegantly through the broken window before Steve could do anything to stop him.  


“What the fuck –“ hissed Steve, feeling genuine anger, but Dustin just shook his head.  


“I’m sorry, Steve,” he said, sounding sincere in his regret, “but I’ve got to. I’m not letting them win this time. You can go, but I’m staying. I’m finding out what’s been happening this whole time.”  


“If you fucking think you’re going anywhere without me,” said Steve, hauling himself into the Lab as well and exhaling in frustration, “then you’ve got another think coming. If you die, I guess I fucking die too. And what do you mean, this whole time?”  


Dustin had the decency to look somewhat ashamed of himself, although not ashamed enough to climb back through the window. Instead, he retrieved his own flashlight, and began to walk down the corridor on tiptoes, picking his way around the shards of broken glass. “Something’s wrong. Has been for a long time, I think. The spies, the flickering lights. You, forgetting about the break-in, and other people forgetting things as well. And…”  


“What?”  


Dustin said nothing for several seconds, and Steve was ready to shine the flashlight in the boy’s eyes and demand that he make more sense, when he spoke. “It’s Dad. I think I’ve seen him.”  


The breath caught in Steve’s throat, and he felt disorientation creep over him. “Wait. But your dad – he’s, you know…”  


“Dead,” said Dustin. “Died when I was four. Massive heart attack. I know. But I saw him a few nights ago, just standing there on the street when I was closing my curtains, and then I opened my window and he was gone. And then again, yesterday, on the sidewalk outside school in the morning. Just like he looks in all the pictures on the mantlepiece.”  


Steve had no idea what to say or do, apart from the vague urge to just give Dustin a hug.  


“Obviously, it’s not him,” Dustin continued. His tone was flat, almost curt. “Can’t be. That doesn’t make any sense. But something’s happening, everything’s going wrong again, and we need to find out what’s going on here.”  


“Why?” said Steve.  


Dustin stared at him. “Because if we don’t, the world might end again?”  


“No,” said Steve, “I mean, why is this going to help us save the world? Why is poking around Hawkins Lab – for the third or fourth time, I might add – going to give us the tools to stop the Mine Flayer or whatever it is this time?”  


“Because knowledge is power, Steve,” said the younger boy. “Knowledge is a weapon and a shield. Can’t beat something unless you know what it is. Can’t win a game until you’ve learnt all the rules.”  


His voice was very steady. Probably too steady, Steve thought.  


But they continued walking, in silence, down to the end of one corridor and then the end of another. There were no signs on the walls, no labels on the doors; these had all clearly been removed when the Department of Energy had closed down shop and left town. They came to an elevator shaft at one point, the doors hanging open and nothing on the other side, and – curious – Steve poked his head over the edge of the drop, shining the flashlight down. He could not see any floor at the bottom, and vaguely considered dropping a stone or something of the sort to test its depth, but had a strong feeling that Dustin would probably call him a fool if he did so.  


Some of the rooms were open, albeit largely empty. They had once been offices, Steve presumed; a few desks still stood, cleared of their paperwork and humanising features, and a swivel chair sat forlornly in one of the corners. It did not look particularly distinct from the office at his father’s law firm, or the insurance company his uncle had worked for in Indianapolis, and this simple fact sat uneasily with him in a way that he did not entirely understand.  


They continued walking. They found a staircase, wide and stately, and made their uncertain way down it, but all that there was at the bottom was another tangled set of anonymous corridors. He hoped that Dustin was keeping track of the way back to the window, because he was beginning to lose his bearings.  


One of the offices they passed, the door hanging half-open, was not entirely anonymous like the rest of them. An official nameplate had evidently been removed, judging by the holes for screws, but a faded piece of laminated paper was still attached to the door behind where it had been. Most of the letters had gone, blurred irretrievably by water damage; all that remained was _-TIN BRE-_ , and Dustin eyed it suspiciously as they walked past it.  


Steve was almost beginning to zone out, turning his mind to other things, when Dustin abruptly stopped walking in front of him, causing Steve to crash into his back.  


“Dude –“ Steve began, but Dustin shook his head quickly, putting his finger to his lips once again, and Steve fell silent, and then – with a rush of quiet dread – realised why.  


Faintly, against the wall in front of them, from around the corner, a warm yellow light was frantically flickering.  


*******

_“…I am prepared to strike a deal that would see it securely in your hands, in exchange for my safe return home to America.”_  


The voice stopped, and the tape began to crackle, with nothing more to play.  


“Well,” said Joyce. “Shit.”  


“So that’s definitely him?” said Murray, peering inquisitively across the cluttered RV.  


Joyce nodded. She’d really thought, she’d really hoped, that she would never hear that voice again. When she’d finally got the news from the school out of the kids, all those years ago – well, out of Lucas, who had been the only one of the three seemingly able to hold a clear-headed conversation at the time – she’d felt a cold, vindictive triumph stirring within her at the news that he’d been killed. She’d saved Will, but nobody had been able to save Martin Brenner, and she was fairly sure that this counted as karma.  


But no. Of course the one unambiguous victory from that year was hollow. Will had returned, but something had come back with him; the monster had been banished, but El had gone as well with it. And now Brenner was coming home again after a few years on the sidelines. Of course. It would have been far too simple if he’d just been dead.  


“Definitely,” she merely said. “I remember him.”  


“Shit,” agreed Murray, nodding his head. “Of course they’re going to let him back in. Don’t try and cling to the hope that they won’t, if that’s what you were thinking.”  


“Wow,” said Joyce. “You’re a real comfort, you know that?”  


Murray shrugged. “Hey, better to rip the plaster off than let it fester. This way, we can be ready. Forewarned is forearmed.”  


“Sure,” said Joyce. “Whatever. Mind if I smoke in here?”  


“Yes, actually, I do,” said Murray. “This is my home, and I’d rather not have it smelling like an ashtray, thank you very much. Go outside.”  


“And a perfect host as well,” muttered Joyce. “So, what, you got evicted from your last place?”  


Murray barked out a single laugh. “Don’t be ridiculous. Left of my own accord. Two groups of people finding me in less than a year is far too much. They can’t track me in this. I’ve got thirty-eight fake registration plates, a set of fake scratches that I can stick onto the side of the RV for disguise, and a couple of wigs for when I’m driving.”  


“And problems,” said Joyce. “Look, never mind. Brenner.”  


“Brenner,” agreed Murray.  


“I could phone Owens,” Joyce suggested. “He might be able to get his return blocked, somehow.”  


Murray smiled grimly. “Don’t bother. Dear old Uncle Sam will have got this message too; he’d have been one of the first people to hear it. I’d give you three to one odds that he’s negotiating a deal right now, trying to undercut Beeching, regardless of what he might have told you about what a nice and friendly guy he is. You don’t get that high up without being perfectly open to deals like this.”  


Joyce shook her head. “God, Murray, do you think you could go without being a paranoid maniac for ten fucking seconds?”  


Murray said nothing.  


“If he’s coming back,” said Joyce, “then we need to protect the kids. Yes, you too. I’ll clock out of work, and then you’re following my car as I drive back to mine.”  


“Might as well just quit the job now,” said Murray, as she opened the door and stepped out of the RV, wincing slightly at the cold air of the gas station concourse. “This isn’t getting resolved any time soon, Joyce. You know that, right?”  


She considered this for a moment, and weighed money against the lives of her children, and thought about prisons, and then nodded.  


She quit. They left.  


There were flashing lights on the way back, an ambulance down some side road, and she smirked to herself, imagining the panic that might be descending over Murray as he followed her in the RV. That way, she could pretend that she hadn’t felt the same way in the first half-second, hadn’t felt the rush of fear.  


There were a lot of things to make you jump, really, if you were in that sort of mood. Maintenance men fixing some streetlights. Traffic cops by the side of the road as it meandered out of town, holding speed-camera guns or whatever they were called. A large truck in her driveway.  


No. Wait. That last one was an actual cause for concern.  


It would probably have been more sensible to park on the road and sneak up on the house, but that had never been how she had thought in a crisis, and for all she knew, time was of the essence. So she pulled the keys out of the ignition before the car had even entirely stopped moving, and grabbed the axe from the back footwell, and sprinted towards the door, wrenching it open.  


A large, dark-skinned man was standing on the other side of it. He was holding a pistol quite calmly by his side, and did not look particularly shocked to see her.  


“What are your children’s birthdays?” he said, sounding genuinely curious about the answer.  


Joyce spluttered. “What the hell – this is my house – what are you doing here? Where are the children?”  


“They’re perfectly safe,” said the man. “If you give me their birthdays, then they’ll give me the all-clear.”  


Joyce blinked in suspicion, but she couldn’t see how this might be a trap. Murray was standing behind her now, and she trusted him to be on his guard for any ambush.  


“Jonathan’s is April 27th,” she said, slowly, “and Will’s is August 3rd. And El’s is the 5th November.”  


“Remember remember,” said the man, solemnly, peering round the corner into the other room, and then smiled. “They’re giving me the thumbs up, so I guess you’re right. Sorry about the rude welcome. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mrs Byers; my name’s Funshine.”  


The man – Funshine – stepped aside, and let them enter; Joyce stepped over the threshold of her house, feeling a profound sense of disorientation and confusion. Then she saw the children, Jonathan and Will and Will’s friends, huddled around the prone form of El in the living room, and this was quickly swept aside.  


“El?” she said, rushing over to her and not bothering to contain the rising panic in her voice. “El, honey, are you alright – what’s happened?”  


“Mom,” said Will, “she’s OK. She’s fine. She’s just unconscious.”  


“What?” said Joyce. “No. No no no. Unconscious is not ‘fine’, Will.”  


“You should have seen the other guys,” said the other boy – Josh, that was his name – in a weak voice, almost automatically. She ignored him.  


“Will,” she said, “what happened?”  


“They cornered us outside school,” said Will, “and El tried to use her powers, but it made her pass out, and then, erm, Mr Funshine and his friend came to rescue us. It’s all OK now. Seriously.”  


“Yeah, I don’t think so,” said Joyce. “All of you, you’re staying here tonight. I’ll phone your parents and clear it with them, tell them whatever I have to. And Will, you’re not going outside unless me or Jonathan or Murray is with you.”  


“Mom –“ he began, a note of protest in his voice, but she shook her head.  


“This isn’t a punishment,” she said. “I’m not mad, I’m not angry that this happened. Well, not angry with you. But we’re not taking any more risks now. Not any more.”  


She shuffled closer to El. The girl was breathing soundly, and her pulse – it took Joyce three attempts to find it – seemed perfectly healthy; someone had put a blanket over her, and removed one of the cushions from the couch for a makeshift pillow. She would be fine, Joyce conceded.  


She stood up, looking around. The house needed to be secured, that was for sure. Traps and guards and weapons at the ready, for when the Vestige came back or when Brenner made a home-visit. She’d been stocking up on weaponry since January (indeed, since 1983, really), and Murray would probably have a few surprises in his RV; the three adults (four, if she included Jonathan) could set up a watch rota overnight, and could let the children get some rest.  


As for traps – oh, who was she kidding? She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t command a full-scale siege; she could barely command the entirety of her brain sometimes. For all she knew, the whole of Winterton was going to be attacking here at some point tonight, and she had no idea how she could even start to hold them off.  


Hopper would have known, of course. He’d have been able to lay traps for the enemies, to stay vigilant for as long as he had to, to fight them off bare-handed if it came down to it. If he was under siege in a cabin, monsters prowling around outside, she’d have put money on him to be the winner.  


He might not have been brilliant at the whole parenting game, by his own admission – the emotional side of things, in particular, had been something of a weak spot – but, by God, he’d been good at protecting his child. Protecting all of the children. But he was gone, and she was left – good at emotions, good at nurturing and caring (although this, too, was a matter of doubt on the bad days), but definitely not the expert at fighting off monsters.  


He was gone, she’d survived. It wasn’t fair. But everyone knew that.  


She’d turned the key, and turned him to ashes. She’d felt a deep, cold stab of pain in a part of her body that she could never point to, and it hadn’t stopped stabbing since. She could feel his absence, feel the empty space in the world where he was supposed to be. When Will had been taken, she’d known, somehow, that he wasn’t gone – she hadn’t felt that kind of pain then, after all. But this was quite the opposite; she knew that he was gone, he was dead, and she just had to carry on without him.  


Yes, maybe she’d loved him, and maybe she hadn’t. It all seemed a fairly academic question by this point.  


Joyce Byers shook her head at nobody in particular, and got to work.  


*******

_– pain, continuing, made worse by the knowledge that it was marching onwards and onwards towards its terrible purpose –_  


*******

The door gave way, and the three of them piled into the house and into the living room where they had seen the face, but there was nothing there any more, apart from the dust-covered remains of a family life.  


“It was here,” muttered Nancy. “I swear it was here. Right in this room. I’m not going crazy.”  


Jasna nodded. “We all saw the same thing, right? A pale face –“  


“Heather,” said Robin, and there was something in her voice that Jasna did not entirely recognise. It might have been regret or grief, but then again, she might have just been stating a fact. She flicked hopefully at the lightswitch, but nothing changed.  


“Power’s been cut off here since July, probably,” said Nancy, who was pacing the perimeter of the room now, like a tiger in a zoo. “Nobody else has been here since the Holloways died; the relatives won’t sell the place yet, since house prices are going up, but they’re not doing anything else with it right now.”  


“And that girl – Heather,” said Jasna, “she was their daughter? One of the people that was killed last summer?”  


“The second one to be killed,” said Nancy. “Taken to the steelworks and possessed by that thing, the Mind Flayer. And now she’s here, haunting her old house. Not where she was died, not where her body was destroyed. Here. That’s interesting.”  


“Yeah,” said Robin. “Fascinating.”  


There was a sound, a faint whisper of noise, from the hallway, and all three of them spun round as one unit as Jasna felt her heart stutter, but there was nothing visible there.  


“Come on,” said Nancy, beginning to tiptoe towards the hallway. “She’s got to be in here somewhere.”  


Jasna did not think that this was entirely true – surely ghosts were quite adept at escaping from places if they didn’t want to be seen – but she followed Nancy, because that was what she’d been doing since that morning outside the church in DC, and Robin trailed after them, seeming less than content with the situation. Jasna wondered if she should say something to Robin – some words of solidarity, maybe, letting her know that they were both in this together – but she had no idea exactly what it would be or how to start, and so they walked on in silence.  


At the end of the hallway was a wooden door with an ornate doorhandle, and Nancy made her way towards that, the two of them following, reaching cautiously to open it. She looked over her shoulder and nodded confidently – Jasna had no idea what this was supposed to convey – and then yanked the door open, revealing an empty kitchen glowing with a faint blue light.  


They peered into the kitchen. The light had no obvious source; it cast no shadows, and seemed to be falling on everything within the room, from the fridge to the toaster to the table. There were still plates on the table, Jasna noticed, dark and stained, and the horrible knowledge dawned on her that the Holloways must have been killed whilst they were mid-meal, and as she was considering this, the light suddenly disappeared.  


“She’s here,” whispered Nancy.  


They edged their way into the kitchen, but there was nobody else visible but the three of them. On the other side of the room – Jasna wondered how she hadn’t noticed it before – another door stood ajar, the faintest hint of a blue light behind it.  


“Nancy,” she whispered. “Robin. I think she’s through there.”  


She pointed, and they turned to look.  


“Was that door there before?” whispered Robin, and Jasna felt a flash of relief that she hadn’t imagined it, followed almost immediately by a sinking dread in the face of what this implied about the house.  


“Come on,” said Nancy, picking up a long-bladed knife from the counter and stepping gingerly towards the door.  


“Put that down,” hissed Robin. “Why do you think that’ll help us?”  


“I’m being prepared,” whispered Nancy.  


Robin was shaking her head. “Ghosts are fucking intangible, you…she’s not going to attack us. Leave the knife.”  


Nancy’s eyes flashed defiance, but she returned the knife to its place on the countertop, and cautiously pushed the door open. Beyond it stood the living room where they had originally seen her.  


“No,” whispered Jasna. “That’s not possible – the angles don’t make sense –“  


Robin snorted slightly. “Those are the outside rules, Konstanjević. We’re playing by Heather’s rules here.”  


The living room was empty. The curtains were closed, although they had not been before, and the door that they had come through a couple of minutes previously was gone. In its place stood another wooden door, ajar again and silhouetted in blue, and Robin sighed and started walking towards it.  


“Should we go through?” asked Nancy. “Couldn’t this be a trap or something?”  


Robin turned to her. “Wheeler, we don’t have a choice. If she can rearrange the house like this, she can trap us here if she wants. Clearly, we’ve got to follow the light. We’ve just got to take the risk, and we just need to pray that she’s not hostile to us.”  


She closed her mouth sharply, and blinked in confusion, as though she’d said more than she’d meant to, and Jasna was about to ask why when the light began to grow brighter.  


“That’ll be our cue,” sighed Robin. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”  


*******

He tried again.  


“Will?” said Mike, into the radio. “El? Anyone?”  


There was no reply. Around him, around that lonely hill, the wind was beginning to pick up, carrying the first hints of rain. He did not pay this much attention.  


“I don’t know if you’re actually there,” he continued, “and just aren’t answering. It doesn’t seem all that unlikely at this point. I know you’re avoiding me, Will, I can tell that much. And I know why.”  


He paused, to gather his thoughts and arrange his words.  


“Will,” he said. “I know why you smashed up Castle Byers. I know why you couldn’t accept my apology, back at Christmas. I know why you don’t want to talk to me. I think I’ve worked it out. It’s because you’re gay, isn’t it?”  


He paused again, in the hope that Will – who was surely listening, he must be; he didn’t have anywhere else to be on a Friday evening – might say something, but there was no reply, and he belatedly realised that just leaving this statement free-floating might be somewhat more ambiguous than he had intended.  


“And it’s fine,” he added, hurriedly. “I’m fine with it. Absolutely and completely fine. You’ll always be my friend. If you want to be.”  


Still nothing. Perhaps there was the faintest of noises on the other end of the radio; perhaps it was just the crackling of static.  


“Look,” said Mike, huddling into his coat a little bit more as the rain began to fall in earnest now, “I get it. I see how saying what I said must have made you feel like I was mocking you, trying to hurt you, like everyone at school did. It wasn’t what I meant – really, it wasn’t – but I understand that it must have hurt nonetheless. Maybe more. But, anyway, it all makes sense to me now – why you said I was apologising for the wrong thing, why you didn’t want to talk to me. You thought that I’d hate you, that I wouldn’t want to be friends with you any more, because I seemed that way back in that fucking summer. And I just want to tell you, plain and simple, that I don’t care about that. I really don’t. I fucked up, but I get it now, and I don’t want it to change anything between us. I want my friend back.”  


By this point, he was beginning to wonder if it was at all possible that Will might not actually be listening to his Supercomm. But he’d gone this far, so he continued.  


“It’s not the same without you here,” he said. “Lucas and Max are doing their own thing half the time, and Dustin’s wandering around asking insane questions about Nancy and manticores and the Kubler-Ross model of grief and, I don’t know, the tensile strength of barbed wire. And sure, I miss El like crazy, obviously, but I’m almost used to that now. It seems weird to say, but I guess it’s true. I think I’ve finally learnt how to love someone who’s a long way away, how to be with someone when they’re not there. But it’s different for you, I think. I’m not used to you being somewhere else. You’ve been here for ten years, more, and now you’re gone. And I’ve got friends here – Dustin and Lucas and even Max, these days – and I’ve got someone I love and who loves me back, who I get to talk to every other day. And it still feels incomplete, because you’re not there.”  


And there it was. A noise. A crackle that didn’t fit in with the other crackles, a hiss and the distant, distant, hint of a voice.  


“Will?” said Mike, hopefully. “I know you’re there – talk to me, man –“  


The voice muttered something again, through a haze of distortion and static.  


Mike blinked like a small animal staring into headlights, and then shook his head, and jumped into action. Because he could do this – he was the president of an audiovisual club, dammit, and he wasn’t going to be defeated by poor radio technology. So he seized the wires at hand, and began to make small adjustments to the box at the bottom of the radio mast, and still the voice kept speaking, murmuring, amidst the noise of the electromagnetic spectrum and an approaching winter rainstorm. And finally, the mast was calibrated, the signal sharp and clear, and Mike grabbed the transmitter again.  


“Will?” he said. “Can you hear me now?”  


The voice that issued from the Supercomm was not Will’s. It was not El’s, or Jonathan’s, or Joyce’s. It did not belong to anyone that Mike had spoken to before, and he would not have forgotten this voice.  


“ _Remember_ ,” it said, like ten thousand people whispering simultaneously, like a whole host of voices somehow alloyed into one. “ _Remember. Repeat. Remember._ ”  


Mike flinched back, as if the speaker had suddenly grown fangs, and felt a cold feeling run down his back, distinct from any fear. For a fraction of a second, he was convinced that something was there, before realising that it was just the rainwater which had been pooling in his hood pouring down his spine.  


“Who are you?” he said, in a shaking voice, and then more steadily. “Who are you?”  


“ _Repeat_ ,” the voice only said. “ _Remember. Remember_.”  


Mike stared blankly at the radio mast again, and then came to his senses, and scrambled to his feet, running, almost throwing himself down the hill, as the heavens opened. It was not a terrified sprint. It was the run of someone on his way to find reinforcements, because – and Max’s words from all those weeks ago echoed in his head – he could not do this alone.  


He came to the edge of the road, where he had left his bike. It was not there.  


He blinked and looked around, shaking his head, because this could not be happening – or rather, if it was, then there was no way that it was a coincidence, no possible way that bike thieves had finally discovered Hawkins on the same night that he received transmissions from what sounded like another plane of reality – but the bike declined to helpfully materialise. So – the decision was quick, almost instantaneous, and a small part of Mike’s brain was considering Mr Clarke’s lectures on the fight-or-flight reflex – he began to run again. He could come back and look for the bike later, he thought as he ran; getting somewhere safe was the priority right now. Home first, that would be best; Nancy would be able to defend them in the case of any immediate attack with her frankly alarming combat reflexes, and he could contact the others from there.  


And then he skidded to a halt, almost tripping on the uneven tarmac, because there, in the weak moonlight that prevailed beyond the city limits of Hawkins, stood a single figure in the centre of the road.  


It had seen him, Mike realised. It was beginning to move towards him, and if he ran, then it was quite doubtful that he’d be able to outpace them, already out of breath and less fit than he should have been. And then the clouds shifted, and the moonlight grew brighter, and the face was visible all of a sudden.  


Troy. It was Troy.  


“What the hell are you doing here?” asked Mike, and he could not keep the slight bemusement out of his voice. “Did you steal my fucking bike?”  


Troy took another few steps forward, as Mike automatically backed away. “I could ask you the same question, Wheeler. What are you doing out of town on a night like this?”  


Mike shook his head, dismissively. “It’s none of your business, Troy. Don’t you have kindergarteners to be stealing lunch money from?”  


“ _Shut up!_ ” shouted Troy, and Mike jumped at the sudden burst of sound. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Wheeler?”  


Mike said nothing. Some part of his brain was overruling the vocal cords, telling him that talking would be a very bad idea right now.  


“You just don’t take me seriously,” continued Troy, and the quietening of his voice was almost more unsettling than the shouting. “Humiliating me in front of the school. Sneaking around and being creepy. Not treating people with the respect they deserve. Well, I’ve got something to get your attention here.”  


He reached into his pocket, and pulled out a switchblade. It might have been the same one that he had held to Dustin’s mouth, three years and a few lifetimes ago.  


“You and me,” said Troy, and now his voice seemed very calm, almost hypnotic, “we’re going to take a little walk, Wheeler. And then we’re going to have a little chat. And then – well, then, I guess we’ll just see what happens from there, shall we?”  


*******

Will’s eyes vaguely drifted open. He’d fallen asleep, he realised, there in the living room, and his aching sides were kindly reminding him of this fact.  


He sat up, slowly and painstakingly. He’d thought he might have heard a noise from his room at one point as he was halfway into sleep, he remembered – a faint crackling, like he’d left the Supercomm on, but it clearly hadn’t been enough to keep him awake. But he was awake now, and was going to make sure that he didn’t let that change again, because for all he knew, a horde of possessed citizens of Winterton was going to burst through the door at any minute. So he pulled himself to his feet, quietly, and padded around the sleeping bodies of El and Maria and Josh, making his way through to the kitchen.  


There was a man leaning against the fridge, a hard-faced man with a brightly-coloured shock of hair staring straight at him, and Will flinched back, before realising.  


“You’re the other one,” said Will. “Funshine’s friend. The one who came to save us.”  


“Axel,” the man said, and added nothing else.  


“Thank you,” said Will.  


Axel nodded in acknowledgement, and turned away, looking out of the window. Will noticed the gun by his side, resting on the countertop as though it were a perfectly normal piece of cutlery.  


“You punched an old woman,” said Will, unsure what else to say.  


Axel’s lips twitched. “Not the first time. Won’t be the last. What do you want, kid?”  


“Just came for some water,” said Will. “Where’s everyone else?”  


Axel shrugged. “Asleep. We’re rotating watches. I guess you’re wondering why we’re here?”  


Will nodded in agreement.  


“For your sister,” said Axel, rolling his eyes slightly. “And her sister. Despite everything she said and did, we’re still holding the fort until she gets back. Funshine insisted, dragged me out here. If little Shirley needs a bodyguard – and looks like she does at the moment – then we’re the best that this country has to offer.”  


“Military?” said Will, and realised what a ridiculous question that was to ask to someone who looked like Axel. “Erm, ex-military?”  


“Nah,” said Axel. “Punks. Go away, kid. Go and drink your water and sleep. There’ll probably be a whole bunch of fighting tomorrow, way things are going tonight.”  


Will took his advice, and tiptoed back through to the living room, sipping his drink. And then he saw that a figure was sitting on the sofa, where there hadn’t been someone before, and he almost choked on the water, before realising belatedly that it was only Josh.  


“Sorry,” he whispered.  


“What for?” whispered Josh in reply, and his tone was strange. Perhaps it was just tiredness, but he seemed a lot less cheerful than normal.  


“Waking you up,” replied Will, still keeping his voice low. “There’s a guy on guard in the kitchen. I was talking to him.”  


“Yeah,” said Josh, standing. “That’s not what I was hoping you were going to say.”  


Will blinked. “What do you mean?”  


“Apologising,” said Josh, his voice soft. “That’s not what I was hoping you’d apologise for.”  


Will stared at him in incomprehension. “What are you talking about?”  


“I’m talking about this evening,” said Josh. “And about your utter failure of a strategic mind. They had a knife to my throat, and said that they’d kill me if you didn’t hand over your memories. And what did you do? You just went and agreed, capitulated prepared to hand over the full and entire contents of your mind. For me. You idiot.”  


“Sorry,” said Will, “you wanted them to kill you?”  


“Yes!” said Josh, and then looked guilty and penitent for raising his voice, although neither El nor Maria seemed to have stirred. “I mean, not wanted, per se. I quite like being alive, don’t get me wrong. But, seriously, you thought that was a good trade to make?”  


Will said nothing.  


“You know what they are,” Josh continued. “Better than I do. You know what they want – they want to conquer the world and remake it in their image, or whatever they were saying – and you know that they need your memories for that. You know full well that this is, like, an integral piece of the puzzle. And you were just going to hand it over?”  


“Yes,” hissed Will. “Because they were going to kill you if I didn’t. Did you miss that part?”  


“Oh, and you think I’d have been all good and fine if they’d conquered the world with your memories?” said Josh. “You think I wouldn’t just have died then? No, you didn’t think about it. You just played their game, let them dictate your actions, and if it wasn’t for these weird people here now, they’d have won. Winterton probably wouldn’t exist any more. For all we know, nor would anywhere else within a fifty-mile radius. Maybe there’d be a massive shadow monster striding across the fields and streets of Virginia. We nearly lost everything right there and then, because of you.”  


“Because of you,” said Will, automatically, not even thinking about the retort, as he focused on the words Josh had just thrown at him. “You were the one that got yourself grabbed by an old lady –“  


“Yeah, and that was my mistake,” hissed Josh. “You shouldn’t have made your own because of that. You shouldn’t have –“  


“Look,” said Will, raising his voice as loud as he dared, “I’m not sacrificing people to win. I’m just not going to do that.”  


“Then you’re a rubbish leader,” said Josh. “Because you can’t win without sacrifices. You just can’t. That’s not how the world works, believe me. And if I’m going to die either way, then I’d quite like my death to mean something, if that’s quite alright with you.”  


“No,” said Will, shaking his head. “No. That’s not alright with me. I don’t want you to die, and I’m not going to let them kill you if I’ve got the choice. Is that so hard to accept?”  


Josh met his eyes, and Will felt the by-now familiar feeling of slight disorientation and uncertainty as he stared back, but he refused to let this sway him from his position.  


“Yes,” said Josh, finally, after a couple of seconds of silence. “It is. Because, Will, I don’t want you to make this decision for me. I don’t want to be the reason the world gets destroyed. I don’t want your sentiments, your feelings, get in the way of doing what’s necessary.”  


And Will saw, to his confusion, that there were tears forming in the corners of Josh’s eyes, ever so faint, but present nonetheless, and he wondered what this meant, and what he was supposed to do about it. And before he could make up his mind, before he could move closer or move further away, before he could say any of the twenty different options that occurred to him (none of which seemed quite right), Josh shook his head, and turned away.  


“I’m going back to sleep,” he said. “And hopefully, in the morning, we’ll know what the hell is going on here and how we’re supposed to stop this thing. And, if it comes down to it, I won’t let you give yourself up a second time.”  


He lowered himself to the floor, and curled up in the corner of the room, his feet by Maria’s side and his back against the wall of the house. And he pulled a blanket over his head, which Will was quite glad of, because it meant that Josh would not be able to see that he was still looking at him, staring at the other boy with an intensity normally reserved for artwork or for particularly good books, a thousand questions and scenarios and half-formed thoughts crowding through his mind like visitors at an exhibition.  


It was a long time before sleep took him again.  


*******

“What is it?” hissed Dustin to Steve, who had cautiously stuck his head a couple of inches around the corner, and was staring towards the yellow light. “Can you see the source?”  


Steve withdrew his head. There was a curious expression in his eyes. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not the Gate. It’s too calm.”  


Dustin nodded in agreement. The Gate last summer had been harsh, burning, crackling with barely contained energy; this light was almost warm, almost inviting.  


“We need to get closer,” he said to Steve, fully expecting to have to contest this point, and was surprised when the older boy merely nodded.  


Around the corner, the view was little better, the light petering through a crack in a large door which someone had left ajar. They crept towards it, and peered through, and whatever Dustin had been expecting, this was not it.  


In the middle of the gigantic and empty chamber on the other side of the door, lit by a couple of small standing lamps, stood a single desk, a swivel chair next to it. The room stretched away into the distance, as far as the eye could see – perhaps it had been where they had kept the Gate once – and yet there was nothing else to be seen, nothing else besides the desk, on the floor of that great space.  


“What does this mean?” said Steve, and Dustin did not have a quick and ready answer, but several more questions.  


“No idea,” he said. “Let’s go and look.”  


“Are you crazy? What if someone comes back –“  


“We’ve come this far,” said Dustin, trying not to sound stubborn, and Steve sighed, and reluctantly nodded.  


“You’re right,” he said. “In for a penny.”  


The door swung open silently when they pushed it, as though someone had been religiously oiling the hinges. Perhaps they had. They scanned the room before they entered, but there was nothing to be seen – at least, nothing within the range of the two yellow lamps – and no soldiers or Demogorgons waiting in any obvious ambush, so they looked at one another and nodded, and stepped over the threshold, and walked with footsteps that echoed in the great cathedral of a chamber towards the desk.  


The desk was littered with papers, piled on top of one another, and Dustin, automatically, picked up the topmost.  


“Dude,” hissed Steve. “Fingerprints.”  


Dustin considered this, and shrugged. “Well, I’ve done it now.”  


Steve rolled his eyes, but Dustin paid no attention, as he began to read. It seemed to be blueprints for some device – something to store some liquids in, with a lot of electronics attached – and was covered in shorthand jottings around the margins, in what looked to Dustin’s eyes like some kind of code.  


He picked up another piece of paper. It did not seem related in any way; this was a set of chemical symbols and diagrams, with neat hexagonal structures arranged across the page. He recognised them, he thought, or at least half-recognised them; whatever this molecule was (and it seemed quite a complex one, so he was not too disappointed with himself for not knowing it), it looked like some kind of amino acid, with some deeply unusual side chains branching away from it. On the other side of the paper appeared to be a process for synthesising such a molecule, which appeared to be a multi-step process involving a wide variety of different reactions.  


The ink was smudged slightly in the shorthand notes at the side of this one, and Dustin, glancing at the desk, saw the pen which must have left them. And this was concerning, he realised, more concerning that it might have initially seemed; whoever had made these notes was either incredibly confident that they would not be tracked down (for, after all, they would have left fingerprints as well), or incredibly careless, or – the worst option of the three – still here somewhere. Yet something made Dustin take another piece of paper from the stack nonetheless, and inspect it for any kind of answers, even as the dread was beginning to eat its way into his bones.  


The third piece of paper was different still. It bore the title ‘ _Early Development of Medulla Oblongata Under Walcott-Lettinger Conditions_ ’, and just as Dustin was beginning to piece together what this might imply, Steve tapped him on the shoulder.  


“What?” he said, trying not to show that his immediate reaction had been one of absolute terror that they had been discovered.  


“There’s this name,” said Steve, “on lots of the documents. Sounds kind of familiar. What does MK Ultra mean?”  


*******

There was another room like that one, somewhere, and it was filled with light.  


“Thirty seconds and counting,” said one of the nameless scientists – they always wore face-covering visors in the Chamber, which would have made telling them apart difficult had this been something that anyone cared about here – and Jack Beeching nodded.  


It hadn’t been easy, getting here, he mused to himself. There had been the failure to get Brenner back from the Russians, although his research notes had been a decent enough consolation prize. There had been that failed experiment back in December, and all of the unpleasantness with the Creature which had ensued from that. Then – after the team structure had been reshuffled, which had given him a fine opportunity to get rid of Owens’s more obvious spies – there had been the other setback, the battle with Sovereign over funding and influence. But all of that had been resolved now: Brenner had apparently made his way out of Soviet hands off his own back; the scientists had worked out where they’d gone wrong back in December; and Sovereign had accepted a power-sharing arrangement over the President’s inner circle in exchange for a free hand in Mexico. This time, things were going to work out just fine.  


“Twenty seconds.”  


Indeed, thought Beeching, he could go broader than that. Getting to the top, period, hadn’t been easy at all. Sure, his family hadn’t exactly been in poverty when he was born – although he’d had to settle for a minor Ivy League place rather than the highest echelons, where his father had been – but he could still safely call himself a self-made man in the old American tradition. He’d had the talent, the nerve, and the good sense to know when and where to move; from Blackwell Minerals to the military contractors, from the military contractors to the secret service, from the secret service to the unofficial circles of movers and shakers in Washington, to here. He’d started out as just some guy from South Carolina, and had climbed nimbly and adeptly through the structures of the country to become one of the main powers behind old Ronny’s throne.  


“Ten seconds.”  


Oh, enough with the introspection. He could do that any time. Here and now, he had a Gate to open.  


Seven seconds from zero, the screens went up – layers and layers of dark-tinted glass, or some substance that looked like glass but was practically indestructible unless you happened to have a supernova on hand. Five seconds, and the lights across the whole of Ansted flickered slightly, as the machine they had built consumed almost every last drop of electricity in a fifty-mile radius, before the auxiliary generators on base activated. Three seconds, and the final failsafes kicked into gear, and the scientists – and Beeching with them – silently crossed their fingers.  


Two, and one, and zero. He hoped that everyone had remembered not to look directly into the Chamber, despite the tinted glass.  


The nuclear bomb detonated. He could feel the observation chamber shake, and knew that the shockwave would not stop until it had reached the edge of the Appalachians at least.  


The light and the fire and the smoke and the energy spread, ballooning, mushrooming, and then – and although he had been prepared for what would happen next, the sight still unsettled him deep on some primitive level – collapsing and melting away, as the structure channelled it down and out. Like a hall of mirrors, he thought to himself, all facing inwards.  


And, just as the scientists had predicted, just as everyone had prayed for, as the bone-white fire coalesced into a single point on the back wall of the Chamber, a tiny bead of darkness appeared at the heart of it, growing and growing.  


The darkness was a foot wide, two feet, five feet, ten. It was bordered with a colour that might have been deep crimson or rich violet, or possibly both at once, and it swum, danced, like a heat haze or like a slick of oil.  


Fifteen feet, twenty, thirty, slowing but still expanding. The Gate had swallowed an entire nuclear bomb without blinking – the air in the Chamber was only slightly above normal room-temperature – with the energy of a hundred and fifty petajoules ripping the skin of the universe and punching cleanly through into another one. And now there it was, fresh for the taking, right in front of them. A new world.  


And, as the Gate stabilised at thirty-five feet in diameter, and the scientists and generals observing began to cheer and high-five, something broke the shimmering surface.  


A hand. It was a human hand.  


Then an arm, and then another one, and then a whole body. It was impossible. It made no sense at all. Someone had just walked through the Gate from the wrong side.  


And, worse, not just anyone. It was a familiar face, one that Beeching knew from his notes and files – a face which suggested a thousand and one possibilities and secrets and further impossible questions.  


There, in the Chamber, in the heart of Ansted, in the real world, stood Jim Hopper.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We've broken a hundred thousand words, and also two thousand views on the story! Thank you to all the two thousand people who have read this so far (or, possibly, one person reading it two thousand times, presumably trying to work out what the hell is going on here) - I'm incredibly happy that this is getting some attention, and very much hope you all enjoy this chapter!
> 
> As per usual: please feel free to leave comments on whatever matter you so choose! Hearing that people are enjoying the story - or, indeed, hearing that they're confused by a particular thing, or disagree with me on something, or have a theory about what might be going on here - is the sort of thing that gives me encouragement to keep going with the writing, so I'd love to hear from you!
> 
> Coming up, hopefully before the end of October (although my new course at university has just started, so I might be a bit slower from hereon out): Chapter 11 - Man of Two Worlds


	11. Man of Two Worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we are - in terms of chapters, the halfway mark of the story... (In terms of words, that might not be true. The length of these chapters is getting quite frankly out of hand.)

They locked the door, and turned on the bright lights, and started the tape.  


“Could you please state your name, for the records,” said Jack Beeching. It was not a question.  


The voice that emanated from the man sitting across the table from him was rusty, dry, as though it had not been used for some time. “No.”  


Beeching leaned back. “Playing it like this, are we, Mr Hopper?”  


“No,” said the man. There was a strange darkness in his eyes, Beeching noticed, like ink. “I cannot tell you my name. It does not translate into your language, into sound. But I am not Jim Hopper.”  


Ah. Interesting. “Are you a native of the other dimension?”  


“Yes,” said the thing that was not Jim Hopper. “I am. I think of myself as Us, but in your world – at least in some circles – I have been known as Entity Orpheus.”  


Beeching’s face did not move, despite the size of this revelation. He was good at that.  


“Perhaps this is not helpful to you,” continued Entity Orpheus, after a brief silence. “I have only made contact with one group of humans before, the servitors of the government official called Samuel Owens. I do not know how far the knowledge of my existence might have spread –“  


“Believe me,” said Beeching, “I am aware of you. And Owens isn’t the only person worth dealing with in the government.”  


The face of Jim Hopper was twisted into something that might have been an attempt at a smile.  


“This gladdens me,” said Entity Orpheus. “I did not find Dr Owens easy to communicate with. I hope that we can negotiate a more fruitful connection.”  


Beeching was back in control of himself now. “Can you tell us about your prior experiences with the human race?”  


“Certainly,” said Entity Orpheus. “Approximately eighteen months ago, I first became aware of the existence of a contained aperture between my dimension and yours. I made my way there – which is to say, I focused my thoughts upon its location, for I do not naturally possess a physical form as you would understand one – and, not long after this, I saw human explorers for the first time.”  


“Did you attempt to communicate with them?”  


“I did,” said the thing sitting across the table from him. “It was not easy. I am used to communicating with others of my kind through instantaneous thoughts and impressions, and their minds were not configured in a way that facilitated this. I am regretful to say that – as I was later informed – I caused some damage to the physical structures containing their minds. I hope you will believe me when I say that I did not intend to hurt anyone.”  


“Is that so,” said Beeching, mostly to himself. “It’s curious that you should say that. Owens has a somewhat different version of events in his report.”  


The face of Jim Hopper did not change, apart from a slight shift in the eyes, which looked almost like resignation. “May I guess how he describes our encounter?”  


“Please.”  


“I presume that Dr Owens describes Us as a dangerous and malevolent invader,” said Entity Orpheus. “I presume that his records describe one, possibly two, attempts on my part to break into your dimension by force and somehow conquer it. I presume that they do not outline my motives, other than a non-specific malice and evil, but they make a great deal of my use of dead human bodies such as this one for the purposes of safe communication between my mind and yours. Above all, I presume that they do not recommend any further incursions into my dimension, for fear that I might break out again.”  


“Your presumptions,” said Beeching, smiling (should he be smiling? Would that work on this thing? Did it know what a smile was?), “are quite accurate. And am I to presume, in turn, that this is not the full truth?”  


“It is not,” said Entity Orpheus.  


“Well then,” said Beeching, “why don’t you give us your side of the story? I’ve always been a big believer in giving equal balance to all parties involved in any dispute, after all.”  


“As you wish,” said Entity Orpheus. Beeching wasn’t sure, but he thought that he was beginning to understand the subtle tones in its voice, and the shifts on Jim Hopper’s face, and this one seemed like relish – a relish which he quite understood. “After the first disastrous couple of encounters between Us and the servitors of Dr Owens, I began attempting to find another means of communication – for, you must understand, I was deeply curious about the nature of your kind and of your dimension. I eventually found that I was able to use the dead bodies of human explorers who had been killed by the hostile environmental conditions of my dimension, to reanimate them and use them as bridges between my mind and yours. It was these bodies that I attempted to cross the boundary between worlds with, as an exploratory mission, but this was met with armed resistance from Owens. I do not know how much detail his reports go into here.”  


Entity Orpheus paused for breath. If it needed to breathe, that was.  


“He eventually met with me, under safe conditions, in the aperture,” it continued. “I explained my nature and my identity, and my wish to gain greater understanding of your world; he, in turn, said much the same thing. I believed that this had cleared up any cultural misunderstandings between us. I proposed an exchange, a trade, of explorers, and a trade of material resources – he was far more interested in the latter than the former – and believed that we would be able to establish a fruitful diplomatic relationship. This did not happen.”  


“Why not?” said Beeching, honestly curious.  


“I do not entirely understand the reason,” said Entity Orpheus, its voice strange. “It appeared to Us as though a dialogue had been established – Owens dispatched explorers into my dimension, and in return I was permitted to extend my own senses through the town of Hawkins. In doing so, I encountered a number of other humans – the one who used to possess this body, and a group of children, one of whom possessed abilities that no other human appears to, which I was most interested to learn about – and I attempted to make contact with them as well. But then, one day, everything came crashing down, as you would say. Owens betrayed me, and the children and the police chief attacked me, and I was forced out of your world, and gravely injured by the measures deployed against me. Owens, it appeared, had found a way of harming my kind, which I am yet to comprehend. Whilst escaping, I was able to seal the aperture between dimensions, for my own safety, but it was opened again the following year by more humans, also aligned with Owens but different in uniforms and thought patterns, and it eventually closed again when their machinery failed, stranding this body on my side. After he had succumbed to starvation, I determined to use his body as a means of contacting other humans, for I had become aware of your attempts to gain access to my dimension by this point, and now here I am. That is the true story, Mr Beeching.”  


Beeching said nothing for a couple of seconds, considering, and not allowing the consideration show on his face.  


“What about the stone circle?” he said. “And the man called Bob Newby, who died? What about the genetic experiments carried out by the Russians? How do they fit into all of this?”  


“I have no idea what you mean by this,” said Entity Orpheus, sounding genuinely confused. “I can only assume that your sources of information are somehow compromised. I have no doubts that Owens wishes to guard his true motivations.”  


Beeching took care to remain calm, as he leaned forwards again. “So you are aware of his motivations, then?”  


“I believe so,” said Entity Orpheus. “I believe that he wishes to use the resources and knowledge which he was able to obtain during his time in my dimension to significantly increase his own personal power in this country. To gain control of the government.”  


“I see,” said Beeching, his tone controlled, and nothing more. Those words could mean a lot, depending on the context.  


To the thing sitting across the table, wearing the dead body of Jim Hopper as though it were a tailored jacket, he hoped that it would be understood to mean, _I understand what you’re saying, and it does not particularly surprise me. I know more than you about this situation – being as I am a native of this dimension, and a powerful one at that – and, although your information is interesting and valuable, it is ultimately a small part of a much larger political context. I am in control of this situation._  


To the scientists behind him, he intended to communicate the sentiment, _I have noted the Entity’s words about knowledge obtained from the alternate dimension. I, like you, appreciate the significance of all this, and will certainly be conducting further investigations, now that we have constructed a stable Gate._ They would like that, after all, and would be far less likely to sell secrets to Owens if they thought that their role in the project was a valuable one.  


To the military men, some of whom had been with him since Nicaragua and Guatemala and Brazil and the other private campaigns of his youth, he was fairly sure that they would hear the words, _I get it. Resources from this other world are powerful enough to take over a government, are they? Well, now that we’ve got our own bespoke Gate for the private use of the army – and maybe the Marines, if they ask nicely – then we’ve just been dealt a royal flush in this year’s round of the Cold War. Cuba, Venezuela, Angola, Vietnam again – hell, maybe even China or Berlin – they could be ours in five years’ time, if we play things right, and dammit if I’m not going to milk this Gate for everything it’s worth._  


And as for Jack Beeching himself, he knew that he meant, _Yes. There we have it, gentlemen. The smoking gun, the footprints in the snow, the fingerprints on the lead piping. Sammy Owens got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, conducting private diplomacy with a foreign power – since that’s what this thing here in the room is, really, a foreign power – and lying about it in his official reports. Maybe he’s planning a coup and maybe he isn’t – I doubt he’s too serious about it, if he is – but whatever’s going on, he’s broken the few rules we’ve still got left. No working with foreign powers to undermine the USA itself for your own gain, like you did with the Russians. No lying to the people who actually matter about issues of national security, like this whole business in Hawkins. And definitely, above all, no turning over the board and playing your own secret games beyond the government. Oh, Sammy, when we take this corpse here to Washington and let it tell its secrets, they’ll have you twisting in the wind._  


“Mr Beeching?” said Entity Orpheus. He could definitely read its moods and tones now – he was good with people like that – and it was uncertain, almost nervous. “Is this information acceptable to you? And do you believe that we can come to a more harmonious arrangement than that which I reached with Owens?”  


“Oh, yes,” said Beeching, and he let himself smile the old Hollywood smile, the charming, reassuring one. “Everything’s going to be absolutely fine.”  


*******

The moonlight was shining over the junkyard when they arrived there.  


Lucas dismounted from his bike, less elegantly than he had wished, and leaned it up against the side of the bus they had sheltered in all that time ago. Somewhere behind him, Max was pacing in frustrated circles in the wet grass.  


“What are we doing here?” she called to him, and he pushed down the momentary flash of anxiety and nervousness that came with the volume of her voice, merely making his way over to her.  


“We’re being ready,” he said. “Setting traps, making plans. I’ve been following the news, tracking the creature’s progress on a map. If it keeps moving at the same speed, it’ll be in Hawkins some time tomorrow.”  


Max nodded. “Cool. And this is our responsibility why, exactly?”  


“Because it’s going to come for us,” said Lucas. “Like, probably, at least. It didn’t have any other reason to attack the bus – it didn’t try to eat any of the passengers once we’d all disembarked –“  


“Disembarked,” repeated Max in a sarcastic tone of voice. Lucas ignored her.  


“– it just escaped into the woods, and then followed me and Dustin. It wants us.”  


Max visibly considered this for a moment, and then nodded reluctantly. “Yeah. Makes sense. I mean, why wouldn’t it be after us? Everyone else is, after all.”  


There was genuine anger in her tone for a moment there, as though something had touched a nerve quite recently, and Lucas wondered to himself whether he should be trying to delve into this, but remembered that they had work to be doing. “I’ve got a theory about why.”  


Max stared flatly at him, although she could not disguise the faint curiosity in her eyes.  


“The four of us that were on that bus,” said Lucas, “you and me, and Dustin and Mike, we’ve all been to the Upside-Down, to its home. Those tunnels, the ones we set fire to – they had the stuff floating in the air and the tentacles and everything. What if it can still smell it on us?”  


Max narrowed her eyes. “Lucas, it’s been over a year. Are you telling me you haven’t showered in all that time?”  


Lucas was not sure whether to laugh or roll his eyes, and settled instead for snorting slightly. “Ha ha. You know I have. Maybe it goes deeper than that, you know, like it’s with us forever now.”  


“Yeah,” said Max, softly. “That would fit. There’s no getting away from it, is there? This is the rest of our lives.”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas, just as quietly. “I think so.”  


They stood in silence there, in the uncertain moonlight, and Lucas reached out his hand to take hers. It was cold and damp, as cold as the flickering wind, and it gripped his own hand firmly.  


“Unless, you know, we win this time,” said Max, and it was not clear from the tone of her voice whether she was joking or being serious. Lucas turned to look at her, and there were no clues for him in her face – just the normal mask, the same one she normally wore at school or in public, or up until recently when dealing with Mike (and he was still confused about that whole development, but it was clearly just one of those things), the one that looked like it didn’t care.  


But he’d learned, over the last year and a bit, to read her, to understand her, and the first rule of Max Mayfield Studies was to try and understand why she was trying to wear the mask in the first place. And Lucas was fairly sure that he knew the reason here, because he sometimes felt the same way himself. To privately hope and be disappointed was one thing, but to have other people know that – in spite of everything, in spite of the last three years of supernatural events and the last sixteen years of your life and the last five centuries of history – you’d still believed, you’d still been optimistic, and all for nothing, was quite something else indeed.  


She was hoping, believing, with all her might, but silently. So was he.  


Maybe this time they would win for good. Maybe this time they could defeat all the monsters and lay waste to the Upside-Down and close every Gate in the world and melt down the keys.  


Hell, while they were at it, maybe they would stop the bullies as well. Maybe they would defeat the policemen who had shot his uncle five years ago in Indianapolis. Maybe they would get Neil Hargrove gone for good, off to somewhere that he couldn’t hurt anybody any more. Maybe they would find a way to stop the people who sometimes marched through Hawkins with their black shirts and their red armbands and their lead-lined words, and the soldiers as well, and the bankers and factorymen and landlords and the whole edifice. Maybe, maybe, maybe this time.  


They stood there, alone, together, both wishing that this would be the final crisis, and Lucas wondered if either of them really thought that it would be.  


*******

Maria Glenny had never exactly been very good at sleeping.  


She’d woken two, maybe three, times in the night, which was usual, although the solidity of the floor in the living room of the Byers house had hardly helped. She’d thought she’d heard Will and Josh talking at one point, but did not catch any of the words through the haziness of sleep, and another time, had been startled into wakefulness by the sound of heavy rain on the roof. And then, at around five in the morning, she had had been convinced that they were back on that street, people with blank dead eyes all around them, El lying motionless on the floor and Josh with a knife to his throat and Will preparing to trade his mind for their lives, and she had just been standing there, doing nothing. And then she woke, and was relieved that it had all been a dream, and then realised with the blunt shock of memory that it had still happened.  


So she lay still, staring at the ceiling as it gradually, imperceptibly, lightened, and ran through the whole scene again and again, and tried to explain herself.  


She’d just done nothing. Just stood there, no use to anyone. They’d have died (and possibly so would the world, if some of the Lovecraft books she’d been using as research were anything to go by), and she would have done nothing to stop it.  


“Next time,” she whispered. “Next time I’ll be better.” But this too was scant comfort, what with the implication that they would be in another life-or-death situation some time soon – probably in the next few days – and with the uncomfortable fact that she had no idea how to fight this thing, this Vestige. She didn’t even entirely understand what it was.  


It was well and truly light by the time someone else in the house stirred, and it was Mrs Byers, walking purposefully and silently through the room. From the kitchen doorway, she looked down at the four of them on the floor – Maria gave her a small wave, which was hesitantly returned – and then turned, and began talking to Will and El’s older brother, who had apparently been standing guard there.  


Automatically, she strained to hear what they were saying – she wasn’t nosy, she was just a curious sort of person – but it was far too quiet, with tired-sounding cadences but no audible words. Nobody in this family was loud enough, Maria ruefully thought. They wouldn’t last five minutes in the Glenny household. And then she remembered her father, who had been transferred to a small private hospital on the edge of Winterton two days ago, and that was another painful thing to think about, so she tried not to.  


Josh was the next to wake up, looking as though there was something on his mind, and then Will, twenty minutes later. The man who had driven them away, and his pointy-haired friend, emerged from somewhere, and were followed by the other strange man who had arrived with Mrs Byers last night; Maria had absolutely no idea who he was, for he had made no effort to introduce himself upon his arrival, but it had not seemed the most important thing at the time.  


And still El slept.  


By eight o’clock, Maria was beginning to worry. They’d breakfasted on cereal and toast, and the punks had wandered outside to scout around the house, and none of the noises that anyone had inadvertently made had caused her to show the least sign of movement. She just lay there, motionless on the carpet, her position unchanged from where they had laid her the previous night. “She’s, erm,” said Josh, and then trailed off as everyone turned to look at him. “She’s definitely still breathing, right?”  


A flash of panic crossed through Mrs Byers’s eyes, but Jonathan nodded in reassurance. “I checked her pulse ten minutes ago. It seems fine, I think. I don’t know much about medicine, but nothing seemed that unusual.”  


“Maybe she’s just tired,” offered Maria, but her voice did not sound convincing even to herself. “I mean, it was a stressful day yesterday, and…”  


“She’d have moved, though, surely?” said Will. “In her sleep, I mean. It’s like she’s comatose.”  


The breakfast table fell silent at that, until the other man – someone had called him Murray, although she had no idea whether this was a first name or a surname – sighed. “Look, there’s an easy way to see if someone’s in a coma or not. Just go and shake them, rather than hoping for some kind of sign. Be proactive, people, come on.”  


“She might need the sleep,” said Jonathan. He looked like he needed sleep himself, his face drawn and pallid, and his eyes blinking every couple of seconds.  


Mr Murray only looked contemptuously at Jonathan, who stared wearily back at him – the two of them seemed to know, and not entirely like, one another, from the look they exchanged – and then stood up before anyone could stop him, striding across the living room and nudging El’s shoulder with his foot. Nothing happened.  


“Ah,” said Will, quietly, and Maria felt the worry rise up within her.  


Mr Murray crouched down beside her, and clapped his hands next to her ear, eliciting the same lack of a response, and then turned to the kitchen and shook his head. The rest of them, one by one, began to approach, until they formed a loose circle around El.  


“El?” said Joyce, softly, putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “El, honey, can you hear us?”  


Nothing happened.  


“We won,” said Josh to her. “For now. If that helps. You’re safe here. I mean, that might be what they’d say, if they captured you, so I don’t know if that helps, but I promise that you’re among friends. Who aren’t possessed. Even if that's what a possessed person would say. Erm, my favourite song is _Enola Gay_?”  


El remained inert. Will stared at Josh in baffled incomprehension, and Josh shook his head apologetically.  


“Hey,” said Maria, taking one of El’s hands in hers. It was no colder than it should have been, which was a relief. “Thank you. For trying to save us. We kind of need you back now, you know.”  


It might have just been her imagination, but she thought the other girl’s hand squeezed hers for a fraction of a second. There was no change on her face, though, and Maria closed her eyes in disappointment and concern.  


“I’ve got an idea,” said Will, quietly. “If this doesn’t work, I’m not sure what will.”  


“What is it?” asked Joyce.  


“Jonathan,” said Will, “can you go check the freezer?”  


Gingerly, Maria placed the plate of Eggos next to El’s head, and Josh poured what appeared to be an unhealthy quantity of maple syrup over the stack of waffles, and El stirred.  


“Oh, for god’s sake,” muttered Mr Murray, but nobody paid him any attention.  


“Mike?” she said, her voice weak but hopeful.  


“No,” said Will, his face oddly controlled. “It’s me. And Mom, and Jonathan, and Maria and Josh. And, erm, also Mr Bauman, for some reason. You’re home, you’re safe.”  


El’s eyes fluttered open, blinking at the light, and she looked confusedly at the circle of people around them. “How long?”  


“Around twelve hours,” said Jonathan, the calmness in his tone almost visible. “It’s OK. We’re all safe for the moment. Some friends of yours from Chicago rescued you.”  


“Kali?” said El, sounding disbelieving, and Will shook his head.  


“Friends of hers,” he said. “Are you alright now?”  


El closed her eyes for a moment, and something crossed her face, before she unconvincingly nodded.  


“What is it?” said Maria.  


El shook her head. “Nothing. Dreaming. Last summer, before. I was home, with…”  


She trailed off, but nobody paid much attention to this, because they had all noticed the same thing as each other, at around the same time.  


Trickling from El’s nose, and showing no signs of stopping any time soon, was a river of blood.  


*******

The great hollow wreck of Starcourt lay flat and dark across the night horizon, and they walked towards it, a slow and stately procession of two.  


Mike walked first, across the empty and potholed parking lot, and Troy followed after, with maybe a foot between them. He’d considered trying to run, but there would be no guarantee of success there; the two of them were roughly even in height, with any advantage Mike might have held from his light and slender body being outweighed by the fact that he had not willingly done any exercise since November. And if, or when, Troy caught up with him, then whatever punishment was waiting for him at the end of their journey would be doubled, at the very least.  


“Why are you taking me here?” said Mike, honestly confused. “I assumed we’d be going down to the quarry. You know, for old times’ sake.”  


“You ask too many questions, Wheeler,” said Troy. His voice was calm, somehow. “I used to think that it was because you were a teacher’s pet, but I guess I was wrong. I guess you’re just an idiot.”  


Mike sighed. “Whatever you say. But seriously, why Starcourt? Just because nobody’s going to stumble across you here?”  


“Because this is where it happened,” said Troy, and Mike realised from the sound of his voice that the other boy had stopped walking, so he stopped too, and turned. Troy was staring up at the unlit ruin in front of him, seeming almost hypnotised. “And you’re going to tell me why.”  


“Where what happened?” asked Mike, with a sinking feeling, for he knew what the answer was going to be. There was only one important thing that had happened in Starcourt, after all.  


“You fucking know what,” said Troy. “Fourth of July, a whole bunch of people come here for no reason, and forty-eight of them die in a fire. Only a few people make it out of there alive, and one of them is the magical Mike Wheeler with his little gang of no-hopers. The same kid whose boyfriend went missing and died and came back to life two years ago. The same kid who hangs out with a bald freak with psychic powers. Doesn’t take a genius to put the pieces together.”  


“Lucky for you, then,” said Mike. Fortunately, Troy did not appear to register this.  


“I don’t know what the fuck’s been happening in this fucking town,” said Troy. “But I’d bet my last hundred dollars that you do. And I’d bet another fifty that you’re the reason it all happened. And you’re going to tell me, now, and if you do a good job, then maybe I won’t show you what colour your stomach is.”  


“Yeah,” said Mike. “I’m not going to do that, Troy.”  


“Yeah you are,” said Troy. “I’m not giving you a choice here, Wheeler.”  


“You should probably reconsider that policy,” said Mike, forcing himself to keep his voice steady. In a way, it wasn’t too difficult. Troy was yesterday’s enemy, a side-quest at best, a distraction from what was really happening (albeit a distraction with a switchblade), and he just needed to get away from this whole situation so that he could get back to focusing on the strange message he’d received. “After all, that friend of mine? The one that you wet yourself in front of? You know we’re still friends, right?”  


Troy said nothing.  


“That’s right,” said Mike, pressing his advantage. “She lives pretty close to here, and I was on my way to see her when you stopped me. Shame if you got that arm of yours broken again, right?”  


He could see the hints of fear and memory dancing in Troy’s eyes, and he held his expression – calm, unafraid, in command of the situation. And then Troy blinked, as though remembering something, and gritted his teeth, and took a step forward.  


“I don’t care,” he said. “Break my fucking arm again, go on. But I’m not leaving until I get answers.”  


“Why the hell do you care so much about this?” said Mike, and it was apparently the wrong thing to say, for Troy’s face contorted into a scowl, and he took another step towards Mike.  


“Pop quiz, nerd,” said Troy. “You ever read the list of names? The people who died here? You remember James Dante?”  


Mike froze, as the memory came back to him. He had known, yes, had been aware of this at one point. James, Troy’s aide-de-camp in bullying and menacing throughout secondary school, had been one of the people taken and Flayed and melted, and he’d known this. They’d read the list of the dead together, him and Nancy, two days after it all happened, and had realised just how big a number forty-eight was in a small town like Hawkins. He’d noticed James’s name on the list, and he’d been unsure whether to feel quite as sad for him as for any of the others.  


And he’d forgotten. Why had he forgotten?  


“Yeah,” said Troy, into the silence. “I fucking thought so. You just think you’re so much better than the rest of us, don’t you, Wheeler?”  


Quite calmly, understatedly, he drew the switchblade from his belt, and flicked it open.  


“Troy,” said Mike, quietly. “He wouldn’t want this.”  


“Oh, he would,” said Troy, and his voice was filled with certainty. “He absolutely would. He’d have loved to see you get taken down a peg, Wheeler, and he’d love to know why he died. He told me. He won’t stop telling me.”  


Mike did not know what to say, what to do, whether to run or fight or surrender or try to negotiate his way out, and as he stood there, frozen in indecision, Troy took another step forward, and lifted the switchblade quite calmly to his chest.  


“You’re going to tell the two of us everything,” said the boy, and there was something strange and warped in his eyes. “And if you’re having trouble thinking, then I’m going to help you out there. And I’ll be the one to say when we’re done.”  


*******

The plane touched down half a mile outside town, coasting to a halt on something that might have been a highway in another world, and Nikolay sank back into the chair, finally allowing himself to relax and running his hands through his unkempt hair in relief.  


“We made it,” he muttered, more to himself than to Kali. “We made it.”  


It hadn’t been a done deal by any stretch of the imagination. The clouds had thickened as they had drawn nearer to Hawkins, flakes of ash beating furiously against the window of the light aircraft, and the turbulence had intensified along with it. Nikolay had tried three times to make the final descent, and had been forced out of it twice by the wind and the clouds, before a tiny gap in the ash had opened up, and he had darted straight for it in the full knowledge that another opportunity might not arise any time soon. And then finding a place to land had been its own challenge; although the landscape around Hawkins was blessed with roads in comparison to the Kamchatka peninsula, most of them had been overtaken by some kind of dark and creeping vegetable matter, and appeared unsuitable to be used as runways. But they were here now, here and safe.  


Well. As safe as the Shadow World would allow, at the very least.  


Nikolay glanced over to Kali, and saw without much surprise or enthusiasm that she was already unbuckling her restraint, and readying herself to climb out of the plane.  


“Wait,” said Nikolay. “What’s the plan? Do we actually have anything even approaching a plan?”  


Kali stared at him. A lot of the old hostility and mistrust was gone, replaced with an expression that looked a lot more weary than anything else. Nikolay understood. He had felt the same since they had seen the holes in the sky. “Yes. Find a Gate, or find where Jane is, and try and make contact with her. She told me, once, that it was possible to send messages across the gap. Lights or something like that. Then we’ll get her to open a portal, and get back into the real world. I’m not staying in this place any longer than I have to.”  


She opened the door. Nikolay considered this plan, weighed up the apparent chances of any of this actually happening, and then shrugged and followed her, and they began to walk in the direction of town, leaving the Soviet plane behind them on the crumbling tarmac.  


In front of them, the shadow of Hawkins jutted from the horizon, looking like a patchwork of crumbling houses and broken teeth mixed together. There were no lights, apart from the dull greyness of the sky, and the occasional burst of red lightning far in the distance, and the ash seemed to be somewhat thicker in front of them than behind them. In the corner of Nikolay’s eyes, there were occasional floating red lights, appearing to hover in the shadows like a will-o’-the-wisp, and when he turned to look at them, they were nowhere to be seen.  


“Your sister,” said Nikolay eventually. “All of Brenner’s children, in fact. All with different powers?”  


Kali nodded curtly. “No sense in redundancy when you’ve got limited funding. Jane can move things with her mind, and also spy on people from afar, but most of us only had one power. Ten could step outside her body, become a ghost. Four could do weird things with gravity; Three and Five could both read minds. Twelve…”  


She trailed off, looking uncertain, and Nikolay would have said something, but just then, a strange noise split the dark midday air, and both of their heads snapped up, searching for the source.  


“Flower-Sharks?” whispered Nikolay. It was no more than speculation – he did not know whether the biota here would be the same as in Kamchatka – but Kali nodded grimly.  


“Probably,” she said. “Or something like them. I can hide us if they come close, but I don’t know how long for.”  


It was a curious thing, Nikolay thought to himself, to be alone, or even just nearly alone, on an entire planet. Yes, there was the short and terrifying young woman walking next to him, and perhaps some of Ozerov’s team were still clinging to survival on the shores of that ink-black ocean, but apart from that, there was nothing else here, nothing else but Nikolay Andreyevich Palenko and the monsters.  


He wondered if other people had walked these streets, these cracked and bleeding streets, before. They must have done, if explorers had been sent by the Americans into this place. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but nothing seemed new here – not just because of the shops and hospitals and houses, the twisted parodies of civilisation, but something else beside this. There was an intelligence somewhere behind all this, something which had lived in this town and was no longer here, and he could feel the temporal hole it had left.  


Sometimes the shadows moved. Sometimes the roads and alleyways faded out of sight, or emerged from the darkness as if to suggest that they had always been there. Sometimes things vanished before Nikolay’s very eyes, little things like stones or plants or streetlights, and they would not return no matter how hard he tried to look for them. Sometimes he thought he saw people walking in the distance, keeping pace with him, or standing still or running, and then he would blink and would realise that he had been looking at the floating drifts of ash, and he would almost convince himself that it had just been an optical illusion.  


And they kept walking, the two of them, into the endless night, into the city of the dead that lay before them.  


*******

Robin stepped onto the bottommost stair, and the world changed.  


She could feel it, a shift, as though she had just put her feet back on dry land after a long sea voyage, and by the slight intake of air from behind her, Jasna and Nancy had felt it too. This was reassuring, in its own strange way. It meant that, whatever the hell was happening in Heather Holloway’s haunted house of all places, it wasn’t just happening to her.  


“Come on,” she whispered to the other two. “Places to go, ghosts to see.”  


Nancy apparently did not think that this was a remark worthy of being dignified with a response, but she stepped onto the staircase behind her, and Jasna followed, her teeth gritted and her jaw set in an extremely characteristic way. There was a blue light at the top of the stairs, shining around the edges of a heavy wooden door and growing brighter and then darker in a steady pulse, and Robin climbed towards it, and the other two followed.  


It was perhaps two minutes before any of them raised the obvious point: that they were walking, but the door was getting no closer.  


“OK,” said Robin, halting. “Any ideas, people?”  


Nancy shook her head. “I don’t get it. If she wants us to follow, why’s she making us go to this much effort?”  


“It’s like Sisyphus,” said Jasna, who right on cue became slightly red and stared at the floor when the other two turned to look at her. “Sorry. That’s not helpful.”  


“No, but it’s nice to have the odd distraction,” said Robin, dryly. “Keep it up, Konstanjević. We might need fun bits of trivia to take our minds off the situation.”  


“But there is no situation, at the moment,” said Nancy, frustration clearly audible in her tone. “It’s just a big staircase. Why did she bring us here, lure us through the house, just for this?”  


“Because,” said Robin, beginning to realise, “she’s trying to send some kind of message here. She doesn’t want all of us to climb these stairs.”  


“Trying to split us up?”  


“No,” said Robin, and things were beginning to lock into place, the strange nightmare logic of Hawkins once again beginning to grip itself around her mind. Of course this was what was happening. Of course it was. Of course there was no running away.  


“It’s me,” she said. “Heather wants me. Alone, no friends, no support. Just like it was before.”  


“What do you mean?” said Jasna, her voice an alloy of fear and curiosity. Robin looked at her, really looked, and was amazed to see that somehow, this other girl – someone who had basically no experience of the whole clusterfuck that was the town of Hawkins, someone who could very easily have found an alternative evening activity than exploring a haunted house – was still there with them, still determined to see the whole thing through. She wasn’t sure that she would have done the same, if she had been given the choice last summer, and yet here Jasna was, sitting on the step below her, staring up at the door with the look of someone fully prepared to walk through it if she had to.  


“It’s a long story,” said Robin. “I wish I could tell you. I actually sort of wish I could. But I don’t think that’s part of the rules here. I don’t think she’d let me.”  


“Look,” said Nancy, and it sounded like she was making a conscious attempt not to sound too harsh, “Robin, we’re not following you. You’re talking like you know what Heather’s doing here.”  


“Yeah,” said Robin, trying to be cavalier. “I think I might. I mean, it doesn’t make sense if you think about it too hard – like, I have no idea quite why this is going on – but I think there’s a part of me that understands the logic at work. Part of me that knows that this whole thing feels familiar.”  


“Please,” said Jasna, “tell us what you can.”  


“It’s difficult,” said Robin, “but I’ll do my best. I’m in a strange place that seems kind of hostile to me, even if it hasn’t actually directly hurt me quite yet. When I go through that door, I’ll have no friends, nobody beside me, nobody apart from her. And there’s something that I need to tell her, when I’m there, and I’ll just need to pray that I’m right and she’s not actually a homicidal maniac, and that doing this was somehow, despite everything, the right choice. Because we’re doing it all again, the whole thing. The tightrope.”  


The look of confusion on Nancy’s face spoke for itself, but Robin closed her eyes, and raised herself unsteadily to her feet.  


“You see,” she said, to the other two of them, “there’s a secret. A Secret. Of mine. And Heather was the first person I told, because we were friends and I didn’t realise back then quite how big a secret it was, and then things were just weird between us for ever after. We stopped being friends – not, you know, officially, but we drifted apart, and I knew the reason why. And I didn’t tell her the whole thing – not the Secret, but everything around it. How it felt to keep the Secret, what it felt like to have her drift away because of it, what it was like to live in a world like that, where it had to be a secret. And now I’ve got to do the whole thing, the confession, and everything else besides.”  


“Robin,” whispered Jasna, her tone controlled, “what’s going to happen?”  


She shrugged. “No idea. That’s the point. And we don’t know what the hell these ghosts are supposed to be – if they’re the Mind Player, or something else from the other world, or just a really bad collective LSD trip or something. But I think I know enough.”  


She took a step upwards, and then another, and the door seemed tangibly closer.  


“Ghosts,” she said. “Unfinished business – that’s what we’re always told. But I think Heather’s here because I’ve got unfinished business with her, not the other way round.”  


“ _Remember_ ,” whispered the walls, as she took another step upwards. “ _Repeat. Remember._ ”  


“Thank you,” said Robin, not letting herself turn around. “Thank you, both of you. Thank you for being here with me tonight. But I think I’m going to have to take it from here.”  


She opened the door, and stepped through.  


*******

“It’s not stopping,” said Josh, pressing another wad of tissue paper to El’s nose as Maria removed the previous one. “What do we do?”  


El wasn’t entirely sure what the problem was. Blood coming out of her nose was surely a good thing, even if the actual powers associated with it seemed to be frustratingly absent.  


“It’s fine,” said Jonathan, but he didn’t sound convinced. “It’s got to slow down eventually, surely?”  


“It’s been five minutes,” said Will. “That’s a lot of blood.”  


“I’m OK,” said El, but her voice was – she was surprised to discover – not nearly as strong as it had been supposed to be.  


“Yeah, you’re not,” said Murray. He was standing over in the corner, where he had been filling Funshine and Axel in on the whole situation. “You’ve probably got something going on with your brain. Just a weird concussion, if we’re lucky.”  


Joyce glared daggers at him, and said, “You’re going to be fine, El. Whatever’s happening, we can deal with it.”  


“Oh, and how are we going to do that, Joyce?” said Murray. “You got an MRI machine in the next room?”  


“Obviously not,” said Joyce, and it sounded to El’s ears as though she were trying not to punch the other man. “But I know where they do have one, if that’s what it takes.”  


“Where?”  


“There’s a hospital near here. A private, government-run facility. It’s where Maria’s father’s been transferred to.”  


“A government hospital?” said Jonathan. “Mom, are you kidding here?”  


“Not like that,” Joyce protested. “It’s safe. It’s under Owens’s influence, not the other one.”  


“We can’t all go there,” said Josh, and El was confused to hear some kind of fear in his voice. “Some of us will have to stay here.”  


“Is that even safe?” said Will. “We shouldn’t split up too much – safety in numbers, and if they see that we’re weak, they might attack…”  


She couldn’t focus on the discussion happening around her. It seemed quite hazy, like it was coming over a badly-tuned Supercomm, and the exact specifics were beginning to be lost on her.  


There was something else, as well, a feeling within her. It wasn’t the powers – she knew what that felt like, although the memory was beginning to slip away after so many months – but it was in the same place, the same part of her head. It was like – how could she describe the shape and location of a thought? – like ice cream straight out of the freezer, or like the shock of cold water, or like the taste of electricity in the air before a storm.  


Maybe this was what everyone else had instead of powers. Maybe this was what being normal felt like. She wouldn’t know.  


“Useless,” she muttered to herself, and the discussion stopped around her.  


“What was that?” said Maria, replacing the blood-soaked tissue with a new one. “Are you OK, El?”  


She nodded jerkily. “Fine. But useless like this.”  


“Do you want to go to the hospital?” asked Will. “It’s fine if you don’t. We’ll think of something else.”  


“No,” she said. “Hospital. With Owens.” He had been kind to her, once, after all. He had given her her real name back, and given Hopper a fancy certificate, and had let her cry on him after Starcourt. And maybe, just maybe, he could tell her what was wrong inside her brain that meant it couldn’t do things any more.  


“Are you sure?” said Funshine.  


She nodded.  


“I can’t come with you,” said Josh, as they were lifting her to her feet, and letting her rest on the sofa. Somewhere, in the other room, Joyce was shouting at Owens over the phone, and Funshine and Axel had gone outside again, for another scouting run to see if their escape would be blocked. Her mind was clearer now, with the decision, and the flow of blood was slowing, and the nutrients from the Eggos seemed to have made their way into her system, which she had learnt about two months ago in Biology. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”  


“Why not?” said Will.  


El looked at Josh, and saw that his face was much paler than normal, and his hands were rhythmically clenching and unclenching. He was breathing deeply too, and she could see the fear on his face.  


“You’ve been hurt,” she said to him. “In a hospital. Right?”  


He bit his lip, and tilted his head. “Well. Yes, once. But that’s not the main reason.”  


“Then what is it?” said Maria.  


Josh stood very still for a moment, and then seemed to come to a decision.  


“No more lies,” he whispered, and turned to them, his eyes bright with tears. “Do you want to hear the truth about my past?”  


*******

“What did you say?” said Dustin, and the starkness of his tone sent a shiver down Steve’s spine.  


“MK Ultra,” said Steve. “Says it right here, on this paper. It’s the name of this whole project, apparently. What is it?”  


Dustin closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, and began to pace in tight circles. “It’s not good, that’s what it is. That was what Brenner was doing. It’s what happened to El.”  


Another shiver, longer and more protracted, followed the first, and Steve’s blood was feeling colder than it should have done. “Shit. Shit. So this means…”  


“Yeah,” said Dustin. “Somebody wants to hijack the project. To pick up where Brenner left off.”  


“We can’t let that happen,” said Steve, his voice aiming for determination and ending up with unconcealed fear. “We’ve got to stop them – if we just burn everything on this table –“  


He pulled the lighter from his pocket, and began to flick at it with trembling hands, but Dustin shook his head.  


“Won’t help,” he hissed. “If they’ve got any sense, they’ll have copies of all of this. And then they’ll know that we were here.”  


“Well, they won’t know that it was us –“ began Steve, but Dustin began to frantically wave his hands, and he fell silent in confusion.  


And then he heard it – the same thing that Dustin had heard. Footsteps, coming from the corridor they had taken.  


“Hide,” said Steve, and Dustin nodded, and the two of them ran.  


It was an awkward, shuffling, sort of run, not elegant in any fashion, as they tried to ensure that the sound of their feet beating against the concrete floor of the vast chamber, but it did the trick, and they were far beyond the reach of the light by the time that the door silently swung open, their backs pressed against the smooth wall, and their hands clamped over their mouths so that the sounds of breathing would not echo. The man that entered – not particularly tall and not particularly short, wearing a long coat and a ponytail – did not seem like he was expecting to see anyone there, merely moving over to the desk and beginning to stare intently at its contents.  


Steve felt an elbow in his side, and turned to look inquisitively at Dustin. The other boy’s face was in shadow, this far from the yellow lamps by the desk, but he could see the movement of Dustin’s head, as he gesticulated sideways, and began to edge cautiously along the wall like some kind of crab. Steve blinked in confusion, but decided that there was probably no harm in going along with whatever Dustin seemed to have by way of a plan, since he had no ideas that were more complex than standing in the shadows until the other man went away, so he began to follow him.  


After a couple of feet, he noticed something odd about the wall, the feel of the concrete pressed against his back and his arms. It had been smooth at first, almost polished, but now it was like sandpaper. He hoped vaguely that his jacket would not suffer, and then reminded himself silently that there were somewhat more important matters at hand.  


Another couple of feet, and the wall was deeply uneven now. He understood why Dustin was heading this way; something curious was happening here, and for all he knew, there might be something in it for them.  


He had been walking, on silent tiptoes, for perhaps ten steps, when he felt the first crack in the wall. Dustin had paused not far after it, and was crouching down, and – with a rush of realisation – it dawned on Steve what this was.  


This was the room where they had made the Gate, a long time ago. And the Gate itself might have closed, but the damage it had done was permanent. It made sense. That was how it had been for him, after all, and for everyone else.  


There were several cracks, he discovered by moving his hand up and down, snaking across the concrete and widening the further they got to where Dustin was crouching, and he sidled closer, slowly sinking down the wall as he did.  


“What is it?” he whispered, as quietly as he could possibly manage. In the silence, and in the stress of the situation, it sounded a lot louder to his ears, but the man at the desk did not turn around.  


“Way out,” said Dustin, as though he were trying not to move his mouth. Steve was filled with a momentary urge to inform him that this was not how whispering worked, but it passed. “Going down.”  


Steve shot a questioning, confused glance in Dustin’s direction.  


“Listen,” the other boy whispered, and Steve bent his head closer to the gaping darkness at the foot of the wall, and held his breath.  


There was something there, yes. Dustin was right. It sounded like water, subdued and distant, water flowing underground.  


Dustin nodded sharply, and began to slowly slide his arm into the darkness. Steve wanted to warn him, to caution him – it seemed like the sort of thing he should have done in that situation – but he had no idea quite what to say, and the man was still there, silhouetted against the lamps, shuffling through the papers just as they had done a minute earlier.  


One arm, and then another, and then Dustin’s torso crept into the gap in the wall. It was far too dark in there for Steve to see how wide it was on the other side, whether Dustin was kneeling or crawling or pulling himself along on his belly, but his legs followed, sliding out of sight, and Steve braced himself to follow.  


The floor on the other side of the gap, when he experimentally put his hand down to feel it, was rough and cold, more like the floor of a cave than of any kind of built environment. But the tunnel did not seem to be particularly steep – at least, not yet, although the sound of water seemed to be coming from a long way beneath them – and it did not seem like there were any other choices, so he began to crawl, his eyes steadily starting to adjust to the almost pitch blackness.  


After around ten feet or so, beyond the reach of the concrete, the floor began to slope downwards, and the ground became significantly more jagged and crumbling. Pieces had evidently broken off the ceiling of the tunnel, which hung low and imposingly above them; the damage inflicted by the great scar in reality left by the Gate had not been neat here, chiselling into the bedrock. Steve gritted his teeth – his knees were beginning to protest – and edged forwards, and as he did so, a blinding pain crossed his forehead, followed by the awareness that he had just slammed it into a protruding corner of stone.  


Barely, just barely, he stopped himself from crying out in pain, merely gasping slightly, but he could feel the blood trickling down his forehead, into his eyes. But he tried to ignore it, ignore the warm stinging sensation, and he pushed his arm forwards, trying to keep crawling on, and that was the mistake.  


The ground was uneven, and as he transferred his weight onto the leading arm, the rock he had chosen to put his hand on let out an unsettling crunching sound, and then – before he could stop it – tore itself loose from the ground, and began to roll down the slope. It bounced off Dustin’s legs – the other boy turned in shock – and passed him, picking up speed, careering off the corner before them, and then shattering after a couple of seconds on some distant floor, with a loud clanging crack that echoed up the tunnel.  


“Shit,” whispered Steve, an automatic reaction, and stared at Dustin’s horrified face. “I’m sorry – I didn’t mean to –“  


But it was too late for that. Behind him, he could hear the sound of running, feet on the concrete floor, and the leading edge of a flashlight beam was beginning to peer into the tunnel behind them, and the secrecy had gone.  


Dustin began to crawl manically forwards, as though his life depended upon it – which was a distinct possibility – and Steve followed, no longer caring about the stinging on his forehead or the blood in his eyes or the grazes on the palms of his hands. All that mattered now was getting to the other end of the tunnel, getting out of this horrific rat trap of a place.  


They rounded one corner, and then another, as the tunnel corkscrewed down and down into the earth, and there was some kind of light in front of them, a dark red glow, and then – quite abruptly – Dustin fell, disappearing over the edge of some kind of precipice, and Steve pulled himself to the edge after him, and stared down.  


He had not fallen far – perhaps around fifteen feet, if that – and was lying, winded, on a metal walkway below, where the rock had smashed itself to pieces. There was a rope attached to the mouth of the tunnel, which descended to the floor below, and Steve grabbed hold of it and used it to lower himself to the floor after Dustin. They could vaguely hear, behind them, the sounds of pursuit, the other man slowly crawling after them.  


Dustin pulled himself to his feet. He was not looking back at the tunnel, but at the wall in front of them, from which the crimson light was impossibly emanating, glowing like an ember despite the coldness of the air down here. Steve glanced around, searching for some way out – the metal walkway seemed to proceed around the corner, through an empty doorframe – and, then, with a unpleasant jolt, he realised where they were.  


“Dustin,” he whispered. “It’s the Russian base.”  


“Yeah,” said Dustin, absently. “Cool. That’s cool.”  


Steve stared at him in confusion, and realised that Dustin was not looking at the wall at all, but down towards its base – down to where the Russian Key machine had been set up back in the summer, if he was not mistaken. But there was no Key there any more. It had been replaced by something else, something which seemed to make very little sense to Steve, but judging by the look on Dustin’s face, was very much not good news.  


There, down on the floor, set slightly aside from the stream of dark running water, was a vast array of glass pipes and distillation cylinders and bubbling flasks, looking for all the world like an oversized chemistry set. Some of the containers were illuminated by steady flames beneath them, causing them to send bubbles of gas through the whole glass labyrinth; in one, a blue electrical current danced across the surface of a cloudy liquid. And beyond that, a great tank of water, around six feet tall, isolated from the rest of the equipment, with a clear window in its side and wiring running across its sides.  


“No,” whispered Dustin, with an equal mix of fear and disgust. “No, no, no. Shit.”  


“What is it?” said Steve. “I don’t – I don’t understand what –“  


“I should have known from the papers,” Dustin muttered. “Those chemicals – some kind of hormone. And the development of the medulla oblongata, the brain stem. Of course. Of fucking course.”  


“Dustin,” said Steve, his voice serious. “Tell me.”  


“We were wrong, Steve,” said Dustin. The sounds of pursuit from the tunnel were much louder now, and the flashlight beam was shining from its mouth. “They’re not trying to hijack MK Ultra. They’re continuing with it, going further than Brenner ever did. They’re isolating the chemicals and structures in El’s brain, and building sensory deprivation tanks to unlock it. They want to build new psychics. And it looks like they’ve nearly managed.”  


*******

It was midnight by the time the trap was complete.  


Max stood back and admired her handiwork, her eyes long having adjusted to the darkness of the junkyard. The entire place was the trap, really; the pair of them had had several ideas, and had decided to go with all of them. There were a few pits, their floors lined with sharpened bamboo sticks (which Neil had once spent an evening describing in vivid detail under the pretext that war stories would have toughened her and Billy up), with leaf-covered nets and carpets over the top of them. There were two bear-traps, which Lucas had apparently found out in the woods somewhere, their jaws spring-loaded and ready to snap shut at the slightest provocation. And, at the heart of the junkyard, their centrepiece – a tripwire, which was attached to a cigarette lighter, which in turn was attached to a short fuse descending into the gas tank of one of the buses. Anything standing there was going to get blown up, sooner or later, and Max only hoped that nobody else in Hawkins regularly came to the junkyard.  


“You think this’ll do?” said Lucas. His face was dripping with sweat, despite the cold evening air; he had been the one tasked with digging the pits.  


Max shrugged. “Guess it’ll have to. I don’t have any more bear traps in my pockets.”  


Lucas half-smiled. “I think I left my other ones at home.”  


They continued to stand there, in a comfortable sort of silence.  


“Hey,” said Lucas, eventually. “Can I ask you a question?”  


“Depends on the question,” said Max, automatically.  


“Mike,” he said, and Max rolled her eyes slightly, because of course it was about that. “I know you don’t really want to talk about it – exactly how you buried the hatchet. But can you at least tell me why you don’t want to talk about it?”  


“Look,” said Max, her voice possibly a little sharper than it needed to be, “why do you care about this so much? We both yelled at each other for a bit, and then we realised that we didn’t really want to keep doing that any more, since we might have been executed by the army at any point, and we both apologised for being dicks to each other, and that was that. Happy?”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas, but his voice was somewhat guarded. “Cool. Sorry for bringing it up.”  


Max sighed. “Look, Lucas, why’s it such a big deal? Aren’t you happy that we’re not insulting each other all the time at school any more?”  


Lucas said nothing for a moment, and then deflated slightly, slumping. “Yeah. I am glad. I just…didn’t really expect it to happen. I always thought I’d have to be the one to make peace between the two of you.”  


“Yeah,” said Max. She was tired, and hungry, but most of her irritation was intrinsic to the situation. “I know you did. You said so, several times. You know that you’re not the only adult in a group of squabbling toddlers, right?”  


Lucas blinked, and turned towards her. “What?”  


“You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s how you always act around us, at school or on the way out to Winterton or whenever. You act like we’re all idiots, and you’re the only sane one in the club.”  


“The Party,” said Lucas.  


She stared at him, flatly.  


“OK,” he said. “I realise that saying that wasn’t the best thing to open with. Can we pretend that I didn’t?”  


She shrugged with one shoulder. “If you like. But the alternative had better be good.”  


Lucas was silent for a moment, and then spoke. “You’re right, I guess. Sorry. I can kind of get that way sometimes.”  


“That’s your alternative, is it?” said Max, but the irritation was beginning to drop away. “Sorry?”  


“Well,” said Lucas, and his voice was defensive, “yeah. That’s the long and short of it. I don’t exactly have a prepared statement or anything.”  


“It’s just annoying, is all,” said Max. “I don’t really want to be dating someone that looks down on me, even if it’s just implicit.”  


“I see,” said Lucas. “So you’re breaking up with me again, are you?”  


“No!” snapped Max, and her voice echoed off the cars and the rigged-to-explode bus. “No! Can’t you just try and be better? Try and not do that?”  


Lucas nodded, but his eyebrows were furrowed in slight confusion.  


“Look,” she said. “I’m not threatening to break up with you, and it would be really nice if you didn’t see this as some kind of relationship game. I’m just telling you something you do that annoys me, and probably annoys Mike and Dustin as well, and I’d very much appreciate it if you stopped. Do you get me here?”  


Lucas nodded, and a deep breath escaped from his mouth. “Yeah. I do. And yeah, you’re right. I should probably try and do something about that, since, you know, it’s probably not a great way to behave towards friends. Or you.”  


“Oh, I’m not your friend now?” said Max, and Lucas’s expression became briefly panicked, before he noticed the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth.  


“Ha ha,” he said. “Real funny. You know, it’s not fair using your intimidation over me like that.”  


“Suits me just fine,” said Max, and she was actually letting herself smile now, because Lucas didn’t actually seem to be taking the whole thing that badly after all.  


They stood there in silence for several seconds, and then Lucas spoke again.  


“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, cautiously, “and I know that’s a bad way to start a sentence, but I’m kind of surprised that you weren’t threatening to break up with me.”  


“What do you mean?” said Max. “If this is some kind of grovelling I’m-not-worthy bullshit –“  


“No, no,” said Lucas. “I’m totally worthy. But, I mean, it’s been around nine months since we last broke up. This is, by far, the longest uninterrupted streak of our relationship.”  


Max considered this. “Yeah. You’re right. Weird.”  


“What changed?” said Lucas. “You finally realised how lucky you were to have this?” He gestured, vaguely, to himself, and Max tried not to laugh.  


“Yeah, nice try, stalker,” she said. “But no. I don’t know.”  


She considered it, and she realised the reason.  


“It’s because I’m sick of games,” she said, a bit quieter now. “I don’t want to play that whole thing any more. Not since July. That’s for kids.”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas, just as quietly. “I get it.”  


“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” said Max. “I’m not saying that I’m just absolutely fine with everything now. But the whole break-up-and-make-up routine, the petty arguments, all of that – that’s over. It’s a bygone age. If I tried to do all that again, it’d be like, I don’t know, wearing pigtails and having a tea party with dolls. Not that I ever did that. It just wouldn’t fit, wouldn’t seem right.”  


Lucas nodded. He was staring a long way away, lost in thought of his own.  


“I kind of feel jealous, you know,” she continued. “Jealous of Stacy and Jennifer Hayes and everyone, and if you tell anyone that, you’ll live to regret it. They get to do all that, to have fun, to play at being teenagers and have sucky social drama and gossip about each other and everything else. And I don’t. Not since July.”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas. “Me too. That summer, you know, I thought it could be like that forever. The six of us, together, doing whatever we wanted, going to the cinema and the pool and hanging out at each other’s houses. And then Starcourt happened, and Will and El left, and everything got colder and darker and it all came back again, just like it always does.”  


“I thought that as well,” said Max. “I didn’t realise we needed to enjoy the summer while it lasted. I didn’t realise that it was our last shot at being teenagers.”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas, his arm snaking around her shoulders and pulling her close. “I know.”  


And maybe she would have said more, but at that moment, a noise split the air, a crashing, clattering sound from the road below, and the two of them turned to one another, identical expressions on their faces.  


“Is that…” began Max, and Lucas shook his head, a panicked look on his face.  


“Can’t be,” he said. “It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow night. I did the math.”  


“Unless it, you know, decided to move quicker for this last leg,” said Max. “The home straight.”  


Lucas’s arm was a lot tighter around her shoulders now, more protective, and she felt like she should have been more annoyed with this than she was.  


“Do we stay here?” he whispered. “It might get us if we run.”  


“We might get blown up if we stay,” whispered Max. “And if you even think about singing that stupid song right now, then I swear to God –“  


“We’ve got bikes,” said Lucas. “Well, bike. We might be able to outpace it, if we’re lucky. It’s only five minutes back to mine.”  


“And that’s safe why, exactly?”  


“It’s probably not,” Lucas whispered. “But if it wants to break into a house, it will. And if it’s here for the Upside-Down, then that’s everywhere.”  


Max nodded. “Yeah. Sounds like our best shot.”  


“Alright,” Lucas whispered, and then pulled her closer for a half-second. “Max. Erm.”  


“What?”  


“If we don’t get through this,” said Lucas, looking her dead in the eye, but trailed off in nervousness, and she had a fairly good idea where this was going.  


“I love you too, idiot,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Now come on.”  


*******

“What do you want to know?” asked Mike, and tried to keep his voice calm, offhand, so as not to encourage the switchblade to move any closer.  


“Everything,” said Troy. “I know that you know it all. I was told to keep an eye on you.”  


“By James?” said Mike, taking a risk, but not a massive one. He could see the fervency in Troy’s eyes, like an animal being driven by a herder. “You said that he won’t stop asking you why he died. He’s talking to you, isn’t he?”  


The sound of knuckles meeting flesh came an instant before the burst of pain that spread rapidly outwards from Mike’s stomach, and he instinctively doubled over, gasping for air.  


“Wrong answer,” said Troy, confident now. “I’m the one asking questions here. This isn’t class any more. Now, tell me, why did all those people go to Starcourt on Independence Day?”  


“Russians,” coughed Mike, through the pain. “Russians, here in Hawkins. Kidnapped them. Don’t know why.”  


For a moment, it looked like Troy was going to buy it, the confusion on his face soon morphing into a strange and unfamiliar focus, as though he were thinking through all the implications, but then he shook his head.  


“Nah,” he said, and delivered another punch, this one to Mike’s side, causing him to stagger backwards slightly. “Nice try. Those people left the festival, just walked off. Wasn’t kidnap, unless those scary Russians are really persuasive. No, this was something weirder, and that’s your ballpark, Wheeler. Now, do you want to give me the real reason, or shall I give you a bit more encouragement?”  


Mike took a deep breath, partially to play for time and try to come up with a better story, but mostly just in the hope that the pain from his stomach and side would recede enough that his voice would stay steady. “Fine. You want the truth? The Lab never shut down, Troy. They were putting chemicals in the water supply, some kind of hypnosis thing, and then they sent out some kind of signal, and made a bunch of people go to Starcourt. Then the feds tried to shut them down, and there was a fight, and a load of bombs got set off.”  


Troy laughed. “Seriously? That’s the best you’ve got? You think that’s even remotely plausible?”  


Mike nodded fervently. It was, a part of him reflected, a lot more plausible than the truth, and definitely something that the Lab would have done if they’d been able to get away with it.  


Troy, in return, shook his head, still smiling, and casually kicked Mike in the side of the kneecap. His leg buckled, and he stumbled to the floor, helped down by a shove to his chest from the hand not holding the switchblade. The other boy stood over him, the moonlight casting shadows across one side of his face.  


“Come on,” said Troy, almost tauntingly. “What’s the matter, Wheeler?”  


“Fine,” breathed Mike. “OK. The mall got destroyed when a creature attacked it, from another dimension, and possessed a whole bunch of people so that it could melt them down to make a stronger body. We stopped it by disrupting the signal back to the hive mind, but we couldn’t get all the people back, because they’d been killed. James was killed for no good reason, Troy, and so were forty-seven other people; they died because they were exposed to something that wanted to use their bodies as biomass, and there was absolutely nothing they, or we, could have done to stop it. They were rabbits and it was a bulldozer. That’s why he died. That’s why they all died.”  


Troy’s expression was very difficult to read, and then he nodded, once, sharply.  


“Oh, that you believe,” muttered Mike, to himself, but the other boy did not seem to be listening. He was staring at a piece of empty air, slightly to the right of Mike, and raising his eyebrows in question.  


“There,” he said, to nobody. “Now you know. Now we know. Now you can leave me the fuck alone.”  


Troy was not looking at him, and so Mike raised himself unsteadily to his elbows and knees. He could try and crawl away whilst Troy was distracted, get far enough that he’d be able to try and run, and just hope that he wasn’t followed –  


Suddenly, abruptly, the side of his chest erupted in pain, and he vaguely registered falling to the cold tarmac again; Troy had kicked him hard, viciously hard, in the ribs.  


“Why?” gasped Mike, and his voice didn’t sound particularly clear to his own ears, but Troy seemed to understand.  


“Those answers were for James,” said Troy, something else in his voice now. “This is for me.”  


Another kick, this one on the other side of his body. The bruises would be symmetrical, Mike thought amidst the pain.  


“Everything,” said Troy. “Everything that goes on in this stupid, fucked-up, piece-of-shit town, it’s all because of you. Always fucking Mike Wheeler, with his fucking friends and his fucking psychic and his fucking everything. King Mike, ruling over a completely different kingdom to the rest of us down here.”  


The next kick was to the stomach, and Mike registered his body curling itself into a tight ball, regardless of what his conscious mind wanted to do.  


“It’s all about you,” said Troy, leaning down and grabbing the front of Mike’s shirt, pulling him to his feet. “James tells me to get the truth from you. The fucking men in black tell me to follow you and your little gang of friends, send reports back to them on what you’re doing. And it’s just gone to your fucking head, because now you act like you own the school, own the town – talking back to me, looking down on me, not taking me _fucking_ seriously –“  


And Mike was not sure how it had happened, but the switchblade was resting on the side of his face now, very cold and very clear through all of the pain, but he could not think of any words to say, no words at all.  


“This is how you learn your lesson,” said Troy, softly. “This is how you remember what your place is again. You’re not King Mike any more, Wheeler. You’re just a loser. You always were.”  


And the knife was cutting into him, into the flesh of his cheek, and Mike could stop himself no longer, letting out a primal, splitting, cry of pain, something which he heard through his own ears as though it had not come out of his mouth, and Troy was smiling manically, like he’d won something.  


“This is what you get,” the other boy said. “This is what you get for stepping out of line. This is what you get for not remembering how the world works.”  


Maybe he said other things. It wasn’t clear, wasn’t even slightly clear, because every single neuron in the mind of Mike Wheeler was focused on the feel of the blood running down his face, and the blunt throbbing pain from his chest and stomach and sides, and above all, the knife which was still slowly moving across his cheek, turning a corner now, cutting along towards his nose –  


And suddenly, the hand holding him in place was gone, and he fell gracelessly backwards, no possibility of staying balanced –  


There was a blue light, somewhere, and noise, shouting, running feet across the tarmac –  


Then other hands were on him, carrying him to somewhere that was not the floor, lying him down, and then the feeling of forwards motion –  


Lights moving past, too quickly to be real –  


The taste of blood in his mouth, like iron, like memory –  


“What the hell? What happened here, Chief?”  


“Fuck knows, Powell. Now shut up and look after him. I’ve got other jobs tonight.”  


Tablets and water, under a bright light, and then a dark room to lie down in, until the pain was no longer shouting at him –  


Sleep –  


Wakefulness –  


*******

“When I was very young,” said Coşkun Bateyi, and the other three fell silent, rapt with attention, “I lived in a village a long way away from here.”  


He gritted his teeth, and reminded himself that he had started now, and definitely couldn’t leave the story at that.  


“It was called Karabey, and it was rubbish,” he said. “Tiny, and a long way from anywhere. Out in the far southeast of Turkey, a couple of days’ walk from the Iranian and Iraqi borders, in the mountains. They were nice mountains, I’ll give them that.”  


All three of them were looking curiously at him, and he refused to meet their eyes. Maria’s father was dying, and El was maybe dying as well, and Will was his own host of problems, and if he started thinking about them as well, added their problems to the memories, then the whole thing would break down.  


“You probably don’t know all that much about Turkey,” Josh continued, aiming for a self-deprecating tone. “So it won’t mean that much to you, if I say that we weren’t – aren’t – Turks, but Kurds. It’s a different nationality, kind of, but we don’t have our own country; we’re split between the others in the area. And in Turkey, when I was growing up, things weren’t exactly all that great between Turks and Kurds – they haven’t been in a couple of centuries – but it was bearable, kind of. But the country was going crazy around us, falling apart, and in 1980, there was a military coup, and then everything changed.”  


He rubbed his eyes. They were still mostly dry.  


“Our language was banned by the new regime,” he continued. “We all had to start speaking Turkish, and to act like we were just normal Turks, to give up our culture and heritage and history. Our political parties were banned, designated as terrorists, things like that. And then, one day, some people came to the village.”  


Nobody else was saying anything. The room was very quiet, with only the ticking of a clock and the steady drip of blood from El’s nose breaking the silence.  


“They said that the government had sent them,” said Josh, and his voice broke ever so slightly. “They said they were bringing order to the provinces, cracking down on unrest. And they shot my uncle, and our neighbours, and several of the other Kurds in the village, because they said that they were terrorists, and nobody stopped them. And we knew that we had to get out, to leave Turkey, to leave the whole place behind – to leave our people behind – and so we made preparations to run. And they caught us.”  


He could still see it, the cold lights from the truck on the road behind them, the fear and panic and awful dead hopelessness on the faces of his parents. It had been a warm and clear night, the Milky Way bright above them, and the wind had been blowing gently up and down the mountain valleys, carrying the calls of owls and the whispering of the crickets. Just like a landscape from a dream.  


“And my mother – my mother – she sacrificed herself,” he said, and he absolutely couldn’t look at Will right now, couldn’t look at someone who had tried to do the same a mere twelve hours ago. “She pushed me and my father off the road, into the bushes, and claimed that she was alone, that she was the only one they’d seen walking to the border. And they shot her, those soldiers, they killed her right there and then. I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye. I hadn’t realised that I needed to.”  


Maria had her arms around him now, and El was holding one of his hands, and Will was presumably looking at him with the irritating compassion and gentleness that he tended to have about him, and Josh could only continue.  


“We got out, eventually,” he said. “Me and my father. Crossed the border into Iraq, but that wasn’t safe either, so then we went to Syria, and then Lebanon. We thought about going to Germany – lots of Kurds went there – but it was the frontline between the East and the West, and my father was convinced that the war was going to come any day now. So we stayed in Lebanon for six months, despite the fact that there was a civil war raging in the south of the country, and my father worked and sold everything he had, and eventually he’d raised enough money to get us two tickets to the USA. To safety.”  


“And here you are,” murmured Jonathan, sympathetically.  


“Here I am,” said Josh. “But, erm, not exactly legally. We tried, we really did, but they said that we couldn’t prove that we were in danger if we returned. They said that we didn’t technically count as asylum-seekers, because Turkey wasn’t on their lists – it was an American ally, after all – and we couldn’t stay for more than two months. So we hid, down here in Winterton, where nobody would come to find us, and we built ourselves a life here. My father works night shifts, long hours at anywhere that they don’t ask too many questions, and maybe one day we’ll open a restaurant or something, but probably not, because then they might find us. And I can’t go to the hospital, I can’t, because they’ll notice me then, they’ll ask questions, and they’ll trace the whole thing back. I’m sorry, El. I’m sorry, Maria. Will. I wish I could come with you, but I can’t, because I’ve got to protect my father. And I can’t go back to Karabey.”  


The silence fell again, and lingered.  


Maybe they wouldn’t understand. Maybe they’d think he was a coward, afraid of anyone in a government uniform. Indeed, maybe he was; the agents of the government surely had more to deal with than a Kurdish refugee these days, and wouldn’t necessarily ask questions upon seeing him (although the colour of his skin was hardly a point in his favour there). Maybe they’d assume that he just wanted out of this whole situation.  


“I’ll stay,” said Will, very quietly. “I’ll stay with you here.”  


Josh looked up, and – for the first time in a while – dared to meet his gaze, and was astonished to see that he had been wrong. There was compassion in Will’s eyes, of course – it was hard to imagine them without that compassion – but it was not the dominant theme. No, Will’s eyes burned with anger, with a righteous fury, and Josh realised quite calmly that if there had been any doubt in his mind about how he felt about the other boy, then it was all gone now.  


“And me,” said Jonathan. “We can’t have all the adults in one place. And Murray will stay as well.”  


Joyce nodded. “Me and El and Maria, and the two gentlemen from Chicago, to the hospital. The rest of you, you’re not to leave the house until we get back. Hopefully it won’t be too long.”  


“Thank you,” said Josh, and his voice was embarrassingly unsteady. “Thank you, all of you – you don’t have to protect me like this –“  


“Yes,” said El, her voice weak but firm. “We do. Part of the Party. One of us.”  


Josh looked around the room, at the adults and Maria and El and Will, and he tried to remember what it felt like as best as he could, to have something that he could hold on to and recall if he ever needed it.  


He wanted to say something – either heartfelt thanks or a joke to lighten the mood, whichever would work – but, for the first time in quite a long time, Josh Bateyi had no idea what to say.  


*******

As Robin stepped through the door, she began to slowly fade to a flickering grey and disappear, and Jasna tried to stifle the noise of fear that was trying to burst from her throat. And then, as the door swung calmly closed, the stairs began, one by one, to fold themselves away, replacing themselves with a jet-dark void.  


“Run,” said Nancy, quite quietly, and it took a moment for the words to register in Jasna’s mind, and then they were both running, hurling themselves down the endless staircase, as the void advanced behind them.  


The door at the bottom seemed almost close enough to touch, but it was still a good twenty seconds of running before they reached it. It leapt open as they approached, before either of them could touch it, and it did not open onto the living room any more, but out onto the garden, and they fell to the cold mud of the ground, gasping for air.  


“Are you alright?” said Jasna, desperately trying to focus on one thing at a time. “Nancy, are you OK?”  


Nancy pushed herself up on her arms, and nodded slightly. “Fine. You?”  


“I think so,” said Jasna. “But – Robin –“  


“I know,” said Nancy, and by the sounds of her voice, she was trying to keep herself together as much as Jasna was.  


“She just – she just disappeared, faded away, and then the stairs –“  


“Jasna,” said Nancy. “It’s OK.”  


“How do you know that?” asked Jasna, and her voice was louder than it should have been. “Has this ever happened before?”  


“Well,” said Nancy, “no, not really. But she knew, Jasna, she knew what was happening. She was ready, and she walked through that door willingly.”  


“And you know why?” said Jasna.  


“No,” said Nancy. “But she did. And I guess we’ve got to trust her judgement there.”  


The two of them sat there, on the unmowed lawn of the Holloway house, and the wind began to blow.  


After a couple of silent minutes, Nancy nudged Jasna with her shoulder, and said, “Hey. Look.”  


Jasna followed her pointing finger, and saw what Nancy had seen. In the house, darting across the front wall, between the windows and from roof to floor, a thin dark crack had emerged.  


As she watched in confusion, it advanced by another few feet, winding its jagged way up onto the roof, and forking, splitting into two new cracks, widening and advancing and bifurcating in turn. They did not seem to go all the way through the wall, for there was nothing visible on the other side; and then Jasna was struck by the notion that they were perhaps deeper than the entire house, or possibly the entire world around them, and the darkness on the other side was not night but emptiness.  


“We can’t stop it, can we?” said Jasna, as if Nancy would know the answer.  


“I don’t think so,” she said. “I mean, how would we?”  


They sat, almost spellbound, as the house unravelled in front of them. It was as though it had aged five thousand years in a minute, although nothing else around it appeared to have been affected; before too long, it was crumbling and splintering, riven with cracks in all directions, crisscrossing the windows and doors and walls in a kind of lattice. Jasna stared at it, unable to tear herself away, for there was still a major part of her that was convinced that Robin was still somewhere in there, even if her rational mind had long since given up on rationality and concluded that the other girl must have gone into some other dimension or something equally insane. And it was odd, for the longer she stared into the disintegrating house, the less and less convinced she became that the cracks were black after all. They might, perhaps, have been a bright and brilliant white. Perhaps they were both.  


And, finally, with very little ceremony, the Holloway house silently collapsed, and ceased to exist. One moment it was a house, and the next it was not, but merely a far-too-small pile of rubble, impossibly covered in moss and lichen and creeping green ferns, as though it had always been there.  


“She’s gone,” said Nancy. “Heather, I mean.”  


“How can you tell?” said Jasna, curiously.  


“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “It just feels like she is. It just seems to make sense that she would be.”  


Jasna began to ask another question, which would have been aimed at discovering exactly what the hell this was supposed to mean, but she considered Nancy’s words, and found with some small surprise that she agreed.  


“So where’s Robin?” she said instead. “Shouldn’t she have made it out?”  


“I don’t know,” said Nancy. “Maybe she’s…”  


She trailed off, shaking her head, and Jasna was not sure, but she thought that she saw a tear in the corner of Nancy’s eyes, before the other girl looked away.  


They sat in silence for another minute, and then – without much warning – Nancy sprung to her feet.  


“Right,” she said, her voice brisk and brittle. “I’m going home. Coming?”  


Jasna stared up at her in shock. “What?”  


“There’s something I need to do at home,” said Nancy. “Now that we’ve found all of this out here. Shall we walk back?”  


“No,” whispered Jasna, and then a bit louder, “no. No.”  


Nancy raised one eyebrow, questioning.  


“You’re just abandoning her?” said Jasna, standing as well. “Robin walked through that door, and you’re just – you’re just going to go home and do your homework? She could be in danger right now, Nancy, she could need our help –“  


“We don’t know where she is,” said Nancy, her tone infuriatingly reasonable. “She’s not in that house any more, what with how there isn’t a house, and we’re not doing anyone any good by just sitting around here. There’s work to be done.”  


“No,” repeated Jasna, shaking her head. “I’m not – I’m not having that, Nancy. Sorry. No, not sorry. I’m not walking off and doing something else; I can’t do that. What’s the point of this important work if we’re abandoning people to their fate when they sacrifice themselves?”  


“She didn’t sacrifice herself,” said Nancy, sounding confused.  


Jasna nodded emphatically. “She did. She was scared, and I could see it, scared of what was going to happen when she walked through that door. But she did it anyway, for us. For the truth.”  


“Well, then,” said Nancy, the briskness back in her voice, “she’d want us to go and find the rest of it. We’re close now, Jasna, we’re almost there, I swear. If she sacrificed herself, then we should make the most of that sacrifice.”  


“No,” said Jasna again, because she had nothing else to say. She should be feeling more anger, she thought, but it just wasn’t coming. She just felt a bit sick, and a bit hollow, and a bit scared. “You do that. I won’t stop you. But I can’t. I can’t just…treat Robin like she’s a chess piece, and like we’ve sacrificed her for a clear shot at checkmate. So I’m going to wait here for her, and wait until I’m sure that she’s not coming back, because I can’t be like you, Nancy. I can’t play the game with you and Owens and everyone.”  


Nancy said nothing, but her eyes were full of something entirely unclear.  


“I’m sorry,” said Jasna. “but I can’t make myself just look at the big picture. I can’t look away from the people involved. So go, go home, Nancy. Find the truth, make this whole thing make sense. Please. But I can’t come with you, because I’m not cold enough yet.”  


Nancy bit her lip, and closed her eyes for a second, and then turned, and began to walk away, over the ruined lawn, to the road behind. She hesitated on the pavement, and looked over her shoulder, and said, “You know, we don’t know that she’s dead. She might be alright. She might come back.”  


“Good,” said Jasna. “Because I’ll be waiting for her when she does.”  


*******

_– concrete walls and concrete floors, all around him, as they marched him through a dark and endless corridor. It was different, here – the air felt cleaner, maybe, or the light felt less poisoned – but he only had a few tiny corners of a mind in which to appreciate it._  


_He could see the world, and hear it, and feel it, because that was what He wanted him to feel. Or – no – maybe Will had been wrong to call the Mind Flayer Him. This was an It, more than anything else, with gender or name or anything like that fundamentally unsuited to the kind of mind which surrounded and pressed in upon and held open the eyes of Jim Hopper._  


_And now It was talking again, reassuring that idiot Beeching that the two of them could cooperate. They were sending It to Washington, for the sake of a political manoeuvre, and they had no idea of what It was, underneath._  


_They looked at It and they saw the wrong things. Some of them saw a person, and some of them saw an alien, and they did not realise that what they were really dealing with was an idea, something as vast as a continent and as small as a particle of dust; and It was an idea that held contained within it the destruction and suffering and subversion of everything that they had ever been aware of in the whole entire world._  


_And he wanted to scream, to tell them what It was, and just to scream in pain, for It had been making him suffer for maybe a month now, but he could not, for It had locked him in a thousand and one mental strangleholds._  


_But he was not quite gone yet. It had not allowed him to die, and that had been agony for the last eternity of a month, but he was beginning to return to his senses. Eventually, it turned out, the human mind could become used to any level of pain. That was the first mistake It had made here, and he was quite determined that it should count for something._  


_Cell by cell, piece by piece, he would reconquer his mind and his body. He would force It into leaving him, and would frustrate whatever plans It might have come up with. He would make It hurt again, would let It feel the pain of defeat, and would make sure that It knew, when the whole thing was over, that It should not have left him alive for the sake of idle torture._  


_Jim Hopper began._  


*******

A grey and white sky in the morning sun, waves and layers of clouds upon clouds riding the winds inland from the flowing sea, faster than someone could run. The sun, in gaps and cracks between the mottled clouds, shining bright and cold; the rain, a long way away, beating down against the ocean below.  


He could have sketched it, if he had a pencil there. He had always used to like drawing the sky, because it was never the same way twice, and the lines and colours and shapes were like nothing that could be seen down on the surface. Maybe he would, one day, draw the sky again.  


But he could not yet, because of everything.  


Will blinked, and turned his eyes away from the window, to the house as a whole. El was lying down again on the couch, making sure to keep her head above the level of her chest; the blood had not yet stopped. Around the kitchen, his mother paced in tight and anxious circles, and Murray stared through the glass on the door, waiting for Funshine and Axel to return and tell them that it was safe to make a break for it, to head to the hospital. Jonathan was in a chair in the corner, staring into space – just as he had been doing just now, Will considered – and, by the couch, Maria and Josh sat, occasionally exchanging quiet words. Josh’s face was different now, Will noticed, and had been since he had told his story. He looked older, maybe, but also a little bit more relaxed; Will had never realised before how much of Josh’s energy and spirit had been a frantic, manic, drive to keep the conversation going about anything other than the village of Karabey.  


And he thought about that story, and about sacrifices and secrets and persecution and the past, and he felt something dawning inside him, like a plant that had been patiently growing underground and waiting for fifteen years to put forward its first shoots. And it was very difficult to put anything into words, but the thoughts that rushed leisurely through his mind with a beautiful and terrible inevitability did not need words, because he knew the lines and colours and shapes of them all too well.  


And it was time. He knew it was time. That was really all there was to it.  


“No more lies,” he said, quietly, but the silent house still heard. “That was what you said, Josh, right? No more lies?”  


Josh nodded. “Yeah. But, erm, that was just aimed at me, to be clear. This isn’t some kind of trade sort of thing; you don’t all need to give out your own secrets as well, in exchange –“  


“Josh,” said Will, and the other boy stopped talking immediately. “It’s fine. I know. But I think I should probably do the same as well.”  


He wasn’t really sure where to look – at Josh, staring in perplexment at him, or at Maria and El on the couch, or at Jonathan’s utterly unreadable face, or at his mother in the kitchen, whose pacing had stopped – so he settled for darting his eyes around the room, and looking at each one of them in turn.  


“It took me a long time to even think about this to myself,” he said, and he had no idea where the words were coming from, “and an even longer time to actually start admitting things to myself. I spent such a long time in denial, and then there was anger, and then bargaining, or confusion at the very least. But I don’t think there’s been any despair yet. I don’t want there to be.”  


The room was so utterly silent. They were not going to stop him or distract him or divert him here, Will realised, and the thought was just as liberating as it was terrifying. This was it. This was actually it.  


“But I think I’m done with all the confusion and questions,” he said, and one tiny part of him was wishing that there could be some kind of background music, because he had always imagined the sound of a string quartet playing an ascending and climbing melody, all those times he had dreamt about this before. “And I don’t want to hide this or deny this or ignore this any more. Not the truth. And the truth is –“ a pause, a quarter of a beat in the string music, but not enough to stop him – “the truth is that I’m gay.”  


His eyes were closed, but not in fear. These were the closed eyes of someone waiting for their fate, and entirely accepting it.  


But nobody else was speaking – why were they not speaking? – so he continued.  


“It’s so difficult to work out when I first realised,” he said. “It’s so tricky to trace it back. Maybe when I was seven, and someone told me what the words Lonnie kept using actually meant, and I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Maybe when I was ten, and I realised that I just didn’t seem to think about things in the same way as the other people at school. Maybe later. The point is, I’ve known for a very long time that something was different about me, and I tried for such a long time to hide that, or to make it into something else – just some kind of harmless weirdness, something that nobody would care about – but I couldn’t hide it forever. And then the monster got me, and then he got me, and somewhere in the middle of everything there, I stopped being able to stop myself from thinking about it. It felt like I was going mad, which, I guess, the whole possession thing didn’t exactly help with, but there it is. It felt like there was some kind of crack in my identity, some kind of problem or flaw, things that couldn’t be reconciled with living a happy life, and so I started to wonder if I never would.”  


He’d opened his eyes somewhere in that, but was still refusing to meet anyone else’s gaze. So he looked at the sky outside instead, and watched the clouds glide impassively by, as he continued.  


“And it was worse,” he said, “because of what it meant in the day-to-day. Because – and I’m really sorry, El, it genuinely wasn’t my choice, and I wanted to never do anything at all about it – it was Mike that I liked. Maybe loved. I don’t know. I didn’t know then, either, one way or the other.”  


Silence.  


“You see,” he continued, “how was I supposed to know how I felt? How’s anyone? When you’ve never felt that way before, when you’ve got absolutely nothing to compare it with – and of course nobody will tell you what it feels like, because you don’t ask, and because maybe they don’t know either – how on earth is anyone supposed to know whether they’re in love with their best friend or not?”  


He took a breath, steadying himself, but he was still in control of the situation here, still had more to say.  


“And then you find out,” he continued, “and I think everyone probably does at some point, that the person you like isn’t exactly who you thought they were. And it doesn’t mean that you were wrong to like them, or that they were a bad person, but it’s just because you didn’t actually know everything about them. You’d been living with a picture inside your head, and then you find yourself having to come to terms with the fact that it was never completely true to life. It was always impressionist, exaggerated, showing what you wanted to focus on and guessing at everything else. And it’s so easy to forget that the person isn’t the picture, until they do something that breaks the spell, and then the picture’s gone forever.”  


_– driving rain, shouted words that echoed off the red-brick walls, tears in a den in the forest –_  


“And then, the next day or maybe the next, you wake up, and the world hasn’t ended,” said Will Byers, and felt his face curving into a small smile, because of how true it all was. “I realised that I’d been in love with a picture of him, and maybe I was going to make a new and more accurate picture, or maybe make a picture of someone else, or maybe just stop drawing forever because of how much hard work the whole thing is, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that there was no way to deny it any longer, and no way to separate it from the rest of who I was. And since then, I’ve stopped trying to deny it to myself, and now this is the next step. Now I tell the people I love. Because –“ and finally, and it was a miracle that it had lasted this long, his voice trembled slightly – “because this is who I am, and I want you to all know that. I want you all to know me. Hello, everyone. I’m Will Byers, and I’m gay.”  


And the longest second of Will’s life passed, there and then, as he stood with his back to the wall in the centre of his living room in a strange seaside town. It was strange, really, the strangest thing; it felt as though he was able to see every single thing that happened in that second, with the clouds outside moving at the speed of continents and the faces of every other person there moving and shifting and reacting in a hundred thousand different permutations, exploring every possible option.  


There, in the space between two ticks of the clock, Will Byers aged, and grew older, by many years, and when the second hand ticked again, he was another person, older and wiser, scared and nervous, dreading and welcoming the answer from everyone else in equal measure, but, beneath it all, somehow calmer. And yes, of course their answer would matter – would matter more than maybe anything else anyone had ever said to him in his life so far – but, in another sense, it did not, because the important thing was that he had finally, finally, finally spoken up and told the truth. And now something unknown would come next, and that was that.  


And the spell was broken, and time began to move at a normal rate again, and the first person to break the silence was his mother.  


“Will,” she said, “before I say anything else here, there’s something quite important I need to say. And that is that I love you, and have always loved you, and will always love you, and that is true no matter who you are. And I’m so very proud of you.”  


His vision, which had been clear, began to become somewhat hazier, and something loosened in his chest, which had quite possibly been tight for fifteen years.  


“And I really don’t want to say the wrong thing here, or say something that won’t help the situation,” she continued – and her voice sounded choked up as well – as she strode across the floor and pulled him into a hug, “but, for what it’s worth, you will always be my wonderful son.”  


And then Jonathan was there as well, also wrapping his arms around the two of them. “And I’m proud as well,” he said, his voice soft and calming, “and very flattered that you’d choose to share this with us. To trust us. Thank you.”  


And eventually, they loosened their holds on him, and then Josh was there, and – to Will’s surprise and confusion – he embraced him as well, for only around a second before stepping awkwardly back, and stared seriously at him, his brown eyes blinking and swimming and never failing to lose their intensity. The other boy opened his mouth, but no words came out, and an expression of slight confusion followed by a wry smile crossed his face.  


“Are you good?” asked Will, and tried not to make it sound desperate or imploring.  


“Yes,” said Josh simply, and smiled again. “Are you?”  


“I think so,” said Will.  


Josh looked a lot more like his normal self now, his eyes darting around the room, his face half-grinning at some inner thought, with a self-deprecating turn to the grin. “Good. I’m very glad to hear that.”  


Maria was next. “Congratulations,” she said, and it seemed like she was struggling to hide a weird kind of glee.  


Will blinked. “Congratulations? Erm, for what? Being gay?”  


“I don’t know,” said Maria. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to say in these sorts of situations. But, erm. You’re pretty cool, and I’m glad we’re friends. So there.”  


He was smiling now.  


“Murray?” said Joyce, having apparently remembered the other man leaning against the door in the corner.  


“What?”  


Joyce glared at him, with the sort of stare that would have knocked a lesser man over.  


“Fine,” said Murray, rolling his eyes, but there was the barest hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Good luck, kid. And good job standing up and saying that.”  


Will nodded, because he had no idea what to say, and then – suddenly – the silence was back, for El had raised herself unsteadily to her feet, and was taking slow and measured steps towards him, with Josh and Maria hovering beside her in case she fell.  


“El,” said Will, “I’m sorry. Really. About Mike. I never wanted to come between the two of you.”  


El said nothing for a couple of seconds, apparently constructing a sentence in her head, and then spoke. “Can’t complain. Makes sense to me. Mike is pretty great.”  


And she was smiling, to his amazement and delight, and that was apparently the final straw for his already beleaguered subconscious, for the tears could not be held back any more, and he laughed and cried at the same time, and it felt like an exorcism.  


“Thank you,” he said, eventually, to El, when he could speak again.  


“Thank you,” she said, and he could tell that she meant a lot of other things with those two words. “Brother.”  


He smiled.  


And then the patrol was back, and telling them that it was safe to go, and Funshine and Axel and Maria and El and Joyce were climbing into the old battered truck that had saved them from the Vestige the previous evening, allowing El to lie across the back seat and rest, and preparing themselves for the hospital at the other side, and – despite any sort of notion of safety or secrecy – Will ran out onto the driveway as well, the gravel spiking at his bare feet.  


“You’ll be OK,” said his mother, before he could say anything. “Hopefully we won’t be too long. Maybe even just a couple of hours. You just need to lay low until we get back, and then we can work out how to win this.”  


El nodded faintly up at him. “Be safe.”  


“I will,” he said. “We will. Good luck with everything there. And I’ll see you soon.”  


He was right, more or less. They would see each other again on the day the world ended. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you, everyone, for continuing to read and stick with this insanely long and pointlessly complicated story! I really hope you've all enjoyed the first half of it - I've very much enjoyed writing it - and hope you'll stick around for the second half as well!
> 
> I would absolutely love to hear from you about your thoughts on the story so far - what you liked or disliked, what's confusing you, what you think might actually be going on underneath everything here (I really love reading people's theories and speculation), or just anything at all! It's always an absolute treat to get feedback from my readers - after all, you're the ones the story's being written for!
> 
> Also, since I believe I've got a fair few American readers out there - please, please, remember to vote on Tuesday. Being British, I don't get a say in your elections (which is a shame, since it's entirely possible that one of the candidates for the presidency might blow up the entire world with the American nuclear stockpile) but you do, so please don't let it go to waste. Remember: if voting didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to stop people from doing it...
> 
> Next time (probably in a couple of weeks) - Chapter 12: Build...


	12. Build

It was a bright and sunny day in the middle of the month of June, she realised.  


The sun stung Robin’s eyelids somewhat – for it felt as though it had been a very long time since she had last felt its light – and she blinked in the brightness, struggling to adjust. She had been…somewhere dark, she thought, dark and quiet, but for the life of her, she could not tell where. But this was a world apart from that unknown place, for the sun was shining, and people were laughing somewhere in the distance, and gentle waves were breaking on the shore of the quarry, and she was about to irrevocably destroy her only friendship.  


Heather was waving from the shoreline, beckoning her over, and she began to walk, her feet heavy and unwilling. She wondered if this was how people felt on the march to the electric chair.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


Robin did not answer immediately, because – just for a second – Heather’s voice sounded nothing like a human voice, but like the wind and the rain and the scraping of stones against older stones. And then she blinked, and told herself that it must have been nothing, and looked at her friend, and did not wonder how she knew what was about to happen, how she knew all the lines that they would say.  


“Sorry,” she said. “Parents, you know?”  


Heather nodded, rolling her eyes. “Your mom’s just so uncool. Keeping you inside on a day like this, when you should be in the water.”  


Robin smiled, and rolled her eyes too. “What’s going on with you? I haven’t seen you all week, now that school’s out.”  


“Not much,” said Heather, shrugging. “Dad took us to Indianapolis for a concert, and then he got really drunk, so Mom had to drive back. Met up with Hannah and Tammy and Eloise at Benny’s yesterday. Oh, and I broke up with Jamie.”  


“What? Why?” said Robin, who had not been surprised the first time she had heard this, and was not now.  


“He was annoying me,” said Heather, shrugging again. “And he was hanging around with Jenny Parry after school. It wasn’t anything serious.”  


“No,” said Robin, smirking. “It never is, is it?”  


Heather let out a delighted chuckle, and splashed Robin with a handful of lakewater. “Rob, you’re so judgemental. When are you going to get a boyfriend, so that I can tease you about him?”  


Robin smiled a contained smile, and averted her eyes. “I told you. I’m not ready for a relationship yet. We’re only fourteen, Heather.”  


“Doesn’t mean you can’t give it a go,” said Heather, still grinning. “You never even talk about boys, Rob. I’ve got no idea where to start with you. Look, why don’t you just tell me your celebrity crush, at least? I won’t tell.”  


“Promise?” said Robin.  


“Promise,” said Heather.  


And Robin remembered the security she had felt, the first time she had been here. It had been a nice day, and she was with her friend, and soon they would be fifteen and would be able to start being like adults. So she’d told her; and once again, she found her mouth beginning to move, without any input from her conscious brain. Somehow, she knew that she needed to say it again, despite the consequences.  


“Agnetha,” she whispered. “The girl from Abba.”  


And, right on cue, the shutters descended behind Heather’s eyes, and Robin felt once again the dizzying confusion of realisation, the sudden awareness that she might have just made an enormous mistake, the feeling – new to her then, but less so now – of falling from a tightrope. Next, she knew, Heather would laugh awkwardly, and change the subject, and would continue to dart uneasy glances at her throughout the rest of the afternoon. And then, in September, she would sit with Hannah and Tammy and Eloise instead, and would be polite and reserved when she spoke to Robin in the corridors at school, rather than warm and energetic like normal. She would hold parties, and Robin would not be invited; she would be kind and Robin would not be the recipient of the kindness. She would drift away, slowly and surely, between that summer day and another one three years later, and nobody would come to fill the gap in Robin’s life.  


Robin Buckley turned, and walked away, feeling hollow inside.  


It was a bright and sunny day in the middle of the month of June, she realised.  


The sun stung Robin’s eyelids somewhat – for it felt as though it had been a very long time since she had last felt its light – and she blinked in the brightness, struggling to adjust. She had been…somewhere dark, she thought, dark and quiet, but for the life of her, she could not tell where. But this was a world apart, for the sun was shining, and people were laughing somewhere in the distance, and gentle waves were breaking on the shore of the quarry, and she was about to irrevocably destroy her only friendship.  


Heather was waving from the shoreline, beckoning her over, and she began to walk, her feet heavy and unwilling. She wondered if this was how people felt on the march to the electric chair.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


Robin blinked again. “What? Didn’t you just ask me that – what are you…”  


But she trailed off, and realised, because of course it would not be over now, after only once. That wasn’t how your unfinished business with the dead worked.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


“No,” whispered Robin, shaking her head.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


She turned again, and began to walk along the beach, and Heather was there as well, standing calmly in front of her, with the poise and posture of something hanging from a long rope.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


“I said no,” said Robin, but her voice was too weak.  


“Rob,” said Heather, “where have you been? You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”  


And she felt a wave of resolve wash over her, resolve mixed together with anger – because she did not deserve this, dammit, did not deserve to have old scars pulled open again and again once they had almost healed. It wasn’t her fault. None of this had been her fault.  


“Where have I been?” she replied. “I’ll tell you where I’ve been, Heather. I’ve been out living my life, by myself, for three years. I’ve been making my own way in the world, because I had to, because nobody else wanted to stand beside me while I was doing it. I’ve been surviving. Sorry that you haven’t been doing the same.”  


Heather stared at her, her face curiously blank and her eyes somewhere else.  


“I don’t get it,” said Robin. “Why? What’s the point of all of this? Why have you dragged me here, just so I can go through all this shit again?”  


Heather’s eyes blinked, and when they had opened again, they were the purest white, or maybe pitch-black – the colour of absence, the colour of a truly empty space.  


“ _Because it is not over_ ,” she said, in a voice that sounded like many different people speaking at once, and simultaneously like the absence of speech, like the sound made by someone failing to say anything. “ _This is not the end._ ”  


Robin had taken an involuntary step back at that sound, at that sight, but no further than that. “What do you mean? Who are you?”  


“ _Heather Holloway,_ ” whispered the voices. “ _And everyone else besides. We are the dead of Hawkins._ ”  


“And you won’t leave,” said Robin. “Because that would just make far too much sense, wouldn’t it. That would make life just that little bit easier, and, gosh, we can’t fucking have that, now, can we?”  


“ _We cannot leave,_ ” said Heather, “ _until we are forgotten. It has always been this way. It is always so with the dead._ ”  


“Yeah,” said Robin, “but the dead don’t normally hang around to enforce this, do they? Why are you here, in Hawkins?”  


“ _Because you brought us here_ ,” the voices said. “ _You and the people of the town._ ”  


“No,” said Robin, shaking her head. “Nice try, but no. I can smell bullshit from ten miles’ distance. What aren’t you telling me, Holloway?”  


Heather’s expression did not change, but she was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “ _There are holes here. It has been weakened, many times before, and now Hawkins is bleeding, Hawkins is dying, from so many different holes in the world._ ”  


“The Gates,” said Robin, nodding. “But they’re all closed now, right? The Upside-Down’s been sealed away?”  


“ _But the holes remain,_ ” the voices whispered. “ _The scars have not yet healed._ ”  


“And where do they lead?” said Robin, feeling her chest constrict.  


“ _Outside,_ ” said Heather. “ _Into nothingness. Into the empty space. Into the Between._ ”  


*******

Kali had seen the streets of Hawkins only twice before.  


The first time, it had not been real. Number Three – no, she corrected herself, his name had been Benjamin Dubois, even if he had never known that in his painfully short life – had been able to receive and transmit images into the heads of others, and one day, he had shown his fellow prisoners some of the things he’d been allowed to see in the minds of one of the guards. Later, much later, Kali would realise that it was nothing remotely special – an empty road in the sun, a couple of people on the sidewalk, a grocers’ shop with a red-and-white awning outside – but, for a long time afterwards, it had been her vision of paradise. It had sustained her when Benjamin had died, wasted away from some kind of sickness; and it had sustained her when the same fate in several different forms had come to Two and Five and Nine and Four and Ten and Six and Seven, the knowledge that somewhere on the other side of the wall was paradise.  


The second time, she had been running, running for her life. She’d been planning it for months, writing down the details in illusory floating letters that only she could see, and finally, a chance had come. A guard had been distracted at just the wrong time, so she’d knocked him out with the picture-book she was allowed and created a spectral duplicate of him, which escorted her towards the exit. When she was as close as they would realistically have allowed her, she plunged that sector of the Lab into darkness, and created a few more illusory people with illusory guns, so that the security cameras would focus on them instead of her. And before the panic could be dispersed, she had smashed open a window and started to run, blinding the guards who tried to intercept her and climbing the great fence around the compound. And then through the woods, through the thorn-bushes and hedgerows on the edge of town, and into the back of a car that looked like it was leaving Hawkins. She’d sat calmly on the back seat, the driver unable to notice the girl behind him, or the pool of blood from her nose which was ruining the upholstery, and he’d driven away. And as he drove, unsuspecting, she’d seen that very same street, the very same awning (although this time it was in the grey darkness of a rainy early evening, and there had been no people on the sidewalk), and realised quite suddenly and vividly that there could be no such thing as paradise in any corner of a world that also contained Hawkins National Laboratory.  


And now she was here again, and the darkness was settled and complete and filled with monsters, and she had no idea where she was going, but it sure as hell wasn’t paradise.  


“You were a spy here,” she hissed to Nikolay, who jumped slightly at her words. “Where did Jane Ives live?”  


“I wasn’t stationed in Hawkins,” said Nikolay, wearily. “Somewhere else completely. They just traded me back because they were told that they needed fifty people for the fake Brenner and his notes, and they hadn’t managed to keep fifty people from the Cathedral alive.”  


Kali tried not to swear in frustration. “Brilliant. What were you spying on instead?”  


“Does it matter?” asked Nikolay, a hint of sarcasm in his voice.  


She considered it, and shook her head. “Not really, no. We’ve got to find the Gate somehow, though – any ideas?”  


She was not really expecting an answer, but the other man tilted his head back in thought, scratching absently at his new beard, and then nodded. “One thing I’ve noticed here. The lights. They didn’t have them back in Kamchatka.”  


Kali followed his gaze, and realised what he meant. The enveloping ashy darkness of Hawkins was lit, every several feet, by some strange floating things – red and glowing, brighter when seen from the corner of the eye than when stared directly at. Like will-o’-the-wisps, or whatever they were called; or, possibly, like tiny contained and perpetual explosions.  


Cautiously, she moved closer to one of them, and found to some surprise that it did not move away, as she had half-expected. Nikolay was following her gingerly, and she crouched down to take a closer look.  


It was hovering, swaying slightly, perhaps three feet off the floor. The intensity of its light was slowly changing, pulsing in a leisurely rhythm from bright to dim to bright again every ten seconds or thereabouts. But this was not the thing that caught her attention; rather, this was focused on the quiet whispering emanating from the crimson orb.  


“What’s it saying?” said Nikolay.  


She shrugged. “Too quiet.”  


“Can you…enlarge it or something? Amplify it with your powers?”  


She rolled her eyes. “You know that it doesn’t work like that. If I don’t know what it’s saying, how am I supposed to transmit that?”  


“Just a thought,” muttered Nikolay.  


“No,” Kali continued. “I think I know what it’s wanting me to do. I’m supposed to stick my head into that light, or some nonsense like that.”  


“Is that…safe?”  


“I’d give it fifty-fifty odds. Got any other ideas?”  


“Yeah,” said Nikolay. “How about, you know, not doing that? We could just keep exploring?”  


“And then what?” said Kali, still crouched down in front of the will-o-the-wisp. “Look, come on, Palenko. You know and I know that we’re not just going to stumble upon a Gate round the next corner – if there was one ready and waiting, then the Flower-Sharks would have devastated Hawkins by now. We need to find Jane in the other world somehow, talk to her and get her to open one up for us, and for all we know, these lights are how we communicate.”  


Nikolay nodded slightly. “True. On the other hand, they might also be small nuclear explosions, or they might be horrific monsters that will devour your thoughts. That would fit with the – what’s the expression in English? – general vibe of this place, after all.”  


“Yeah, well,” said Kali, “I’m willing to take that risk.”  


And, before she could change her mind, she plunged her head forwards, into the crimson light.  


It was very cold, and then very warm, and then normal again, and her eyes slowly cleared, the red haze of the floating orb gradually retreating to the edges of her field of vision, and she was somewhere else entirely.  


She was driving a car, she realised. This would have been somewhat concerning if she had possessed any control over her arms and legs, but she did not; they seemed entirely in command of the situation, turning the wheel and pressing the pedals, as the car made its way through the night. Upon closer inspection, she realised that they were not in fact her arms; not only were they white-skinned, but also appeared to be significantly longer and wider than hers.  


There were blue lights up ahead, and the car slowed down; there was muttering in the back seats, alerting Kali to the fact that there had apparently been other people in the car this whole time, and then the window was wound down, and she found herself leaning out, and staring into the face of a policeman.  


Her mouth moved without her permission, which was good, because her immediate reaction would have been to flinch away. There had been a lot of cops in Chicago, and none of them had been on her side at any point.  


“ _Oh, hey, Callahan,_ ” she found herself saying, in an amicable male voice. “ _Nice night for it. What’s with the roadblock?_ ”  


“ _A bit of respect would be nice, Harrington,_ ” said the policeman. Despite everything, Kali found the time to be bitterly unsurprised that this white man whose body she appeared to be temporarily inhabiting was perfectly able to talk to cops in this way, without fear of repercussion. “ _But you can go through, you’re not what we’re looking for here. Why are there a couple of kids in the back seat?_ ”  


“ _Picking them up from a camp,_ ” said someone on the seat next to him, quickly. “ _Is there a problem?_ ”  


“ _What, up there?_ ” said the policeman, nodding his head towards the roadblock. “ _Too early to tell. New Chief thinks that there is, but he’s a bit paranoid._ ”  


“ _The new Chief?_ ” said Kali’s mouth again, still in the male voice from before.  


The policeman nodded. “ _Jim’s replacement. Some guy from the big city. David Waxham. He’s been jumping at shadows for the past few weeks, but I guess I can’t blame him, what with…_ ” He tailed off.  


“ _What with what?_ ”  


“ _You know,_ ” said the policeman. “ _The summer. Starcourt. All the deaths. Hawkins is a weird place these days._ ”  


“ _Yeah, but has something actually happened?_ ”  


“ _Tonight? Gunfire on West Martin, apparently, but nobody saw anything. Waxham seems to have got the idea into his head that this is somehow connected to all sorts of other things – suspicious behaviour from random people, you know, or some break-in at the old Lab last week. But then, he’s the sort of guy that gets his news off late-night talk shows. More conspiracies than a CIA meeting._ ” The cop chuckled to himself. “ _Anyway, you can go through._ ”  


They drove on, into the darkness, and there was muttering in the car around her, but it did not seem tremendously important to Kali. None of this seemed to hold any real significance in the current situation; it was no concern to her, after all, if someone in Hawkins had shot someone else. And then, with a jerk, she found herself falling backwards, pulled out of the man’s head, and landing solidly on the cold and ash-covered floor.  


“Sorry,” whispered Nikolay, whose hand was next to the light, having apparently just nudged her. “See anything?”  


“Some weird memory,” said Kali, scrambling to her feet. “Guy in a car talking to a cop. No idea what that was about.”  


“Well,” said Nikolay, his voice very soft, “I really hope it was worth it.”  


He lifted his arm, extremely slowly, not making any sudden movements, to point across the road, and she automatically turned to face in that direction.  


There, standing in the swirling ash, utterly motionless, was the silhouette of a Flower-Shark.  


*******

They fled, the cold night air made warm with fear, and something followed.  


Lucas was trying very hard not to turn around, not to look over his shoulder to see what was happening behind them. It was difficult enough to steer the bike as it was – it had been built for one twelve-year-old, not two fifteen-year-olds – and the road down from the junkyard was littered with potholes and stones, since it was not in the part of town where things like this were dealt with by the authorities. But the temptation was too much, and he flicked his head round for a split second, and saw the monster.  


It was the same one, he was fairly sure. Even discounting the whole Occam’s-Razor aspect of the situation (for there were probably not too many monsters running around Indiana at this point), he recognised the grey skin, the short tail, the scar along its side, running leisurely behind them at a distance of fifty feet or so. That night, in the tree, had remained very much in his dreams in the previous month, normally ending in a much worse way, but he could use the vivid mental image to his benefit here, at least.  


“Faster, faster,” yelled Max, in his ear, and he bit down on a sarcastic retort, because he needed all of his lung capacity for other purposes. But he leaned forwards, throwing his weight onto the pedals, and perhaps it was only his imagination, but the bike seemed to speed up slightly.  


And now they were on the edge of the hill, and he gritted his teeth as he accelerated into the downhill stretch. Normally, he would relax and free-wheel from this point. Normally, there was not a monster chasing them.  


“How close?” he said, through deep gasping breaths.  


“Thirty feet,” said Max, who sounded as though she were focusing on something else. “Maybe twenty. Can you keep us going in a straight line for a moment?”  


Lucas stared at the road ahead, searching for potholes, and nodded uncertainly. And then there was a blur of silver at the corner of his field of vision, and Max snarled out a held breath, and he heard the sound of clattering metal on the road.  


“What was that?” he yelled.  


“Wrench from the junkyard,” said Max, sounding angry. “Tried to throw it. Missed. Fuck.”  


Lucas registered this, and then realised that they were nearing the bottom of the hill, and he needed to dodge the speed bumps at the bottom; he leaned sideways, trying to turn without losing any of their momentum, and just made it, feeling the wheels skid ever so slightly on the soil of the side of the road before they were back on the tarmac.  


“Any more things to throw?” he shouted, while half of his brain was trying to work out how quickly they could be home. One block, and then the junction, and then the crossroads…  


“Two of those bamboo sticks,” replied Max; he remembered that she had grabbed them as he had been readying the bike to leave, “and the other cigarette lighter. That’s it.”  


“Bamboo burns,” he gasped, feeling the momentum from the hill begin to dissipate. “Mr Clarke said. November. Very flammable.”  


He felt her nodding sharply against his head, and moving, and then – he turned quickly to see – the stake was lit, catching light quicker and brighter than a normal piece of wood should have been able to.  


“Shall I throw it?” said Max, sounding almost gleeful.  


“About to turn,” gasped Lucas; there was a stitch in his side now, and the sweat was running down his face. “Wait until then. Better shot.”  


And he kept cycling, willing the bike to move faster and faster, steering gradually to the left-hand side of the road, and then – in a manoeuvre which he would have never even attempted in ordinary circumstances – turning sharply right, cutting the corner, praying that there was nothing coming in the opposite direction. The bike shot across the tarmac, leaning alarmingly into the turn, and for a moment, Lucas was convinced that they were going to tip over, with the extra weight from the back, but – miraculously – he righted them as they began to straighten up again, and he felt Max throw the burning spear as they did, and then heard her triumphant cry.  


“Got it!” she yelled, and Lucas risked another look, and saw that she was right; the bamboo stake, flames licking over its surface, was embedded in the shifting skin of the monster, and it was shrieking in anger, but still following, even as its flower-petal face opened up and began flailing at the stake, trying to pull it out.  


There was no time for celebration, not yet. It was not going to stop.  


Behind him, he could hear Max lighting the second stake, but he did not pay too much attention to this, as he continued to pump his feet against the pedals and spur the bike on. They were nearly at the crossroads now, and then they were nearly there; they just needed to get home, and get to the garage, and use the guns that his dad had been keeping there ever since the news about a lynching down near Nashville, and maybe that would stop it. It had run from Murray’s gun, back in January, and he hoped, prayed, that it would remember that as well.  


He risked another look as they crossed the crossroads, mercifully empty of any other traffic, and saw with no surprise that it was still following them, although a bit further away now. It had removed the stake from its shoulder – Lucas could see it smouldering quietly at the side of the road, the fire creeping across the grass – but it was slower, perhaps, trying not to put too much weight on the limb in question, or perhaps that was just pure and simple wishful thinking.  


Max gripped him tighter, her left arm clutching his right-hand side, and he fought to ignore the dull ache in his legs and his stomach. He turned back to look at the road ahead, the road which headed into town, and began to ready himself for another corner, shifting to the opposite side of the road and bracing himself to lean into it.  


And then there was light, stabbing blue light and yellow light and a deafening sound, bright and clear in front of them on the road, and – instinctively, automatically – he jerked the handlebars to the left, and suddenly lost control. The bike left the tarmac with a crunch, running over the fallen branches at the side of the road, and he felt himself falling, toppling sideways, and a second or two passed in absolute confusion and panic, before he felt Max’s hand pulling him up, and dragging him forwards in a stumbling run.  


“What –“ he began, and then stopped, spitting blood from his mouth.  


“Police car,” said Max, between breaths as the pair of them ran across the leaf-littered soil and through the bare trees. She was still holding the bamboo stake, Lucas noticed, although the fire had been extinguished. “Didn’t stop. Don’t know if it hit the monster.”  


A shriek echoed through the forest in reply.  


“Where’s your house?” demanded Max, and there was a note of fear in her voice for the first time.  


It took Lucas a moment to get his bearings. “There,” he said, pointing through the trees at the silhouette of a building, and they sprinted towards it, despite the thorns and the mud and the blood flowing from Lucas’s mouth and leg, and they could hear the sounds of something moving through the woods behind them, and then they were there, into Lucas’s backyard, crashing through the chicken-wire fence and staggering across the lawn, up to the back door.  


It was locked. Of course it was locked. He had locked it, three hours ago, having not realised that he would be needing access later.  


“Front?” said Max.  


He shook his head. “Climbed through the window. Drainpipe.”  


“Shit,” said Max, but mostly to herself, as the pair of them hobbled towards the side of the house. Lucas briefly thanked whatever higher powers there might be that they had both had a great deal of practice at climbing his wall before.  


“Go,” said Max, shoving his arm. “Climb. I’ll be right behind you.”  


“No, you –“ began Lucas, but Max interrupted him.  


“I’ve got the stake,” she said, pulling the lighter from her pocket as well. “And you’re bleeding. Fuck’s sake, Lucas, fucking climb.”  


He tried to protest, and realised that he could not think of any words to say – the pain in his leg was hardly helping here – and so he hissed out a breath of anger, and grabbed the drainpipe with one hand and the creeping ivy with the other, and pulled himself upwards on trembling arms, up to his ajar window, and as he turned, he saw it.  


The monster was there, its face hanging open, pacing deliberately across his lawn, evidently limping, towards Max. She had seen it as well – how could she not? – and she calmly, coolly, lit the bamboo spear again, and then took a step back, placing one hand against the wall and patting it along until she found the ivy, and then she fell still.  


“Climb, climb!” shouted Lucas, deciding that there was no sense in trying to be quiet when everyone involved had seen each other.  


“Can’t,” said Max, quite quietly, and Lucas realised a moment later. If she turned around to climb, then the monster would surely pounce, would see its opportunity to avoid the spear and the flames, which appeared to be the only thing still holding it at bay.  


They stood, motionless, like some strange tableau, and Lucas could feel his heart beating faster and faster, the fear a tangible presence within his chest and his brain. But, beside that, there was another part of his mind, silently being logical and assessing the situation, and it suddenly hit him; he was the only one here who could make a move without disturbing the balance, since it had not seen him.  


So – hating himself for doing it – he turned away, turned his back on Max, just for a moment, and yanked his window open, and leapt into his room, and then wondered what to do. His initial plan had been to run to the garage, find a gun, but that would be too far; it would have overcome its fear by then, or Max’s spear would have burned out, or something.  


So he stood, frozen in indecision, and then blinked, and grabbed the first large thing that he could see from his cluttered desk, and swung himself out the window again, onto the roof, and threw the heavy object in his hand with all his might.  


The book flew through the air, and all twelve hundred pages of the hardback edition of _Capital, Volume One_ , by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, hit the creature square in the face.  


It staggered back, clearly not having expected this, and Max threw the spear, and spun, and began to climb, pulling herself up the drainpipe, her face pale with fear and exertion. Lucas scrambled to the edge of the roof, and lowered his arm, which she grabbed, and pulled her upwards just as the creature tore the burning stick out of its side and sprung forwards, but its jaws were just a fraction of a second too slow.  


The pair of them, clutching onto each other, stared down into the flower-face of the monster as it stared back up at them, still and calculating. Then it cocked its head, and let out another eerie shriek, and it turned, and began to slowly stalk away, back into the woods, and the pair of them hauled themselves through the window, and collapsed as one on the floor of Lucas’s room.  


They had made it. They were safe. God only knew how long that might last.  


*******

The military hospital was not a particularly noteworthy building, which Joyce supposed was probably the point. It stood at the end of a long driveway, on an otherwise deserted road perhaps five miles out of Winterton, and took the form of a relatively discreet red-brick building in the heart of a grove of poplar trees. Owens, or whoever had been the one to commission this site, had clearly wanted it to appear pleasant, unthreatening, and three years ago, Joyce might well have seen it in that light.  


The truck juddered to a halt in the silent parking lot, and Axel immediately leapt out, slamming the passenger door behind him, and jogging towards the entrance, one hand inside his coat.  


“What’s he doing?” said Maria.  


“Just making sure we’re safe,” said Funshine, calmly. “Checking all of the likely ambush points, before we head inside.”  


“We don’t have time for all this,” said Joyce. El’s eyes had been closed for the last few minutes, and although there was no shift in her breathing, the blood had not stopped pouring from her nose on the entire journey, running down onto Joyce’s trousers. “We’ve got to get her inside. Quickly.”  


Funshine hesitated for a moment, then nodded, and opened his door as well, and they supported El into the building, with Maria following them. It was just as tranquil inside as outside, apparently, or at least the reception area was, with neat wood-panelling on the walls and a dark green carpet. A woman was sitting behind the desk, and she stood, smiling, to greet them.  


“Ms Byers,” she said. “Dr Owens informed me that you were on your way here, with your daughter. Dr Vaudrais will be with you shortly.”  


“Owens isn’t here?” said Joyce, perhaps more sharply than she needed to.  


The receptionist did not break her smile. “I’m afraid he’s engaged in important work in Washington, Ms Byers. He asked me to apologise to you for his absence, and to pass on his reassurances that Dr Vaudrais could be trusted with all…confidential details of your daughter’s condition.”  


Joyce nodded, slowly.  


“Excuse me,” said Maria, moving towards the desk. “Can I visit my father? I was told he was here as well.”  


“Timothy Glenny,” added Joyce, in clarification.  


The receptionist blinked, and looked down at the paperwork on her desk, and then smiled again, and said, “I’m afraid that isn’t possible right now, Miss Glenny. Your father is currently seeing one of our doctors, but we’ll let you know if he’s able to take visitors later.”  


They stood in awkward silence for a few minutes. There was a soft music playing, Joyce noticed; something classical, she thought, with strings and flutes and things like that. She had never been much of an expert on this sort of stuff.  


Eventually, a taller woman with a long grey ponytail and a white coat strode into the reception, glanced at the four of them standing there, and nodded, ushering them through into the corridor. They followed her for a few hundred yards – the building was significantly larger than it had appeared at first, apparently – until they reached one of the many anonymous wooden doors, and found themselves in what appeared to be a perfectly normal doctor’s office.  


“So,” said the woman – Dr Vaudrais, clearly – once they had sat, her voice bearing the slightest hint of a French accent. “Miss Ives, I believe.”  


El glanced up in surprise at the woman. “Byers. Jane Eleanor Byers.”  


“Of course,” said Dr Vaudrais, seeming not to think much of the matter either way. “I’m familiar with your medical history, and your personal history as well. I’ve been working under Dr Owens for almost a year now, as a part of Operation Rembrandt – the cleanup operations from the disastrous failures at Hawkins Laboratory – and I’m quite familiar with the details of MKUltra. I presume, then, that your presence here today has something to do with that?”  


El only rolled her eyes and pointed to her still-bleeding nose, and – as Funshine smiled slightly in approval – Joyce hastened to clarify. “El’s been unable to use her powers since last July. Yesterday, she knocked herself out trying to reactivate them, and since around eight this morning, her nose hasn’t stopped bleeding.”  


“I see,” said Dr Vaudrais. “What were the circumstances in which you attempted to reactivate your powers, Miss Ives?”  


“Fighting,” said El, her voice weak but steady. “Against _them_. The Vestige.”  


“Ah,” said Dr Vaudrais, writing on her clipboard. “The remains of Entity Orpheus, yes. And you were unsuccessful in activating them?”  


El nodded.  


“I see,” said Dr Vaudrais again, and turned back to El, her tone businesslike. “Firstly, then, I’m going to give you some pills. They’re local coagulants, which means that they should stop that nosebleed of yours. After that, I’m going to run a brain scan; we’ve got a machine that can do that for us, and then I’ll have a look at the results.”  


“Will you be able to fix her brain?” said Maria, who blushed slightly as all eyes in the room turned to her. “Sorry, El, I didn’t mean –“  


El shook her head. “It’s OK. Will you?”  


“Can we restore your powers?” asked Dr Vaudrais. “I’m not sure. Depends what the problem is.”  


Once the coagulants had been obtained and taken, and the flow of blood had ceased – which, Joyce felt, was by no means reassuring, as it seemed very much to be tackling the symptom rather than the cause – Dr Vaudrais ushered them out of the room again, and guided them through the maze of identical corridors to another room, this one significantly larger and containing a large circular machine attached to a bed. Dr Vaudrais rattled off a quick explanation of the procedure, which Joyce completely failed to follow – something about scanning El’s brain in cross-sections with X-rays, which she could only assume was less dangerous than it sounded – and then led El over to the machine itself, whilst a masked man in a white coat beckoned the other three of them into a room at the side, separated by a large window.  


Dr Vaudrais joined them after a few seconds, and pressed a large blue button. The bed, and El with it, slowly slid backwards, until her head was in the circular device; the masked man turned a few dials, and pressed another button, and Joyce tried to stay calm, to suppress the protective instinct that was telling her to shut the whole process down, because she had no idea what the problem was.  


They remained in that room for ten minutes or so, and El remained on the bed and in the machine, lying very still, occasionally clenching her hands into fists in an automatic motion of worry. And then, eventually, Dr Vaudrais apparently decided that it was enough, and turned the machine off, extracting the bed from it.  


El was brought into the room with the rest of them, where she fell into Joyce’s arms – her face looked paler than before, but it was unclear whether this was from the procedure or from anything else – and Dr Vaudrais disappeared, and returned a few minutes later with a series of black-and-white pictures and a file of paperwork.  


“This is your brain,” she said rather calmly to El. “This –“ she pointed to a section of the image which had been circled in orange marker – “is the medulla oblongata, the brain stem. According to Dr Brenner’s research notes here, this forms the central nexus of your powers – where it comes from, if you like. Our images of it are showing some rather interesting things.”  


“What is it?” said El.  


“By the looks of things,” said Dr Vaudrais, “when you burnt yourself out yesterday, Miss Ives, it was the first significant piece of damage that had been done to the medulla oblongata since July. This is consistent with your observation that you have been unable to use your powers since then, of course. What is less consistent with this is the rate of healing.”  


“I’m sorry?” said Joyce.  


“Your brain, Miss Ives,” said Dr Vaudrais, “appears to be remarkably resilient, in almost all regards. Despite the injury you sustained yesterday, which is visible here as a rupturing of certain synapses, there are already some signs of repair, after only one day. The earlier injury, from July, is barely visible at all, with only a few traces remaining – old scars, if you like, although of course the brain tissue does not scar in the same way the skin does.”  


“No,” murmured Joyce in agreement. “It doesn’t. But what does this mean for El?”  


“What it means is this,” said Dr Vaudrais. “Miss Ives, as far as I can determine, there is no clear reason in these images why you are unable to use your powers. As far as the physical structures of your brain go, they are little different to how they were before July, or indeed how they were before your release from Hawkins National Laboratory.” Briefly, she opened the folder, and showed them all a similar image of a brain, bearing a timestamp in early 1983. “Your medulla oblongata has long since been healed after the trauma it underwent in the summer. The damage done here will be fully healed within a few days. When Dr Brenner built you, he did it well.”  


Joyce looked at El, and saw that her face was flickering between several different emotions – hope and confusion and fear and the recollection of dark memories – until it finally settled on one, which was curiosity. “But I can’t use my powers. I’ve tried. I’ve tested, every day. Nothing.”  


“Indeed,” said Dr Vaudrais. “Which leads me to conclude that there must be some other reason – something beyond simple brain damage – for your lack of powers. Something else must be causing this.”  


*******

Jim Hopper looked out of the eyes of an abomination, and watched the world go by.  


He had been riding – no, the two of them had been riding – in the back of a military truck for almost an hour now, the wooded mountains beginning to give way to flatter ground. They had left Ansted in the early hours of the morning, in conditions of the utmost secrecy; Hopper was not sure, but he presumed that very few of those stationed there had been aware of this transfer, considering the speed at which his body had been moved from the military complex into the vehicle. Once there, his body had been tied up with no small level of care, and his wrists were still chafing from the rope. Before that, there had been the tests, which had been their own level of unpleasantness – Beeching’s scientists had extracted blood, and other substances, from his body, and had rounded things off with the surgical amputation of the little finger of his left hand. They had promised It that they would only be using this to better study the effects of the Upside-Down on the human body, and It had smiled and had allowed them to do it, claiming that it did not feel pain, and It had known full well that he still very much could.  


And now they were riding in silence, him and It and four heavily-armed soldiers, on their way to Washington.  


“Excuse me,” It said, suddenly, to one of the soldiers. “Might I ask if Mr Beeching is making this journey with us?”  


The soldier shook his head. “Only us. Don’t want Owens spotting a major military convoy, after all, and Mr Beeching has his own business to attend to back in Ansted.”  


“I understand,” It said, smoothly. “It is always wise not to take unnecessary risks. I trust the recording of my interview with Mr Beeching is being transmitted separately?”  


The soldier nodded. “Copies have been made, and some have already been sent to our allies in Washington. This way, even if Owens tries anything, we’ve still got our insurance in place. We can take him down.”  


“And then what?” It asked, sounding curious, and Hopper realised with a slow, dawning dread what was about to happen, and knew that he would not be able to prevent it.  


“Then we can win the war,” said the soldier, grinning to himself. “No Owens means that Beeching gets control of the treasury. He’ll allocate a much bigger portion of it to the military – Owens was always scared to give us what we asked him for – and we’ll use the technology we’ve been developing at Ansted in strategic zones around the globe, hit the Russkies just when they think that things are calming down. They can’t match us in an arms race, and they won’t be able to match us on the battlefield once Beeching’s calling the shots in Washington.”  


“A most noble aim,” It said. Hopper could feel the calm smile on his face. “You have my condolences that you will not be a part of it.”  


“What –“ the soldier began, but he did not finish his sentence, for a fist that had once belonged to Jim Hopper, freed from its restraints by sheer force, slammed into the side of his face, and Hopper heard the sound of crunching bone in both the soldier’s skull and his own fingers.  


In the same motion, It sprang to his feet, tearing the ropes away with inhuman strength, and threw itself across the truck before the other soldiers could react, landing on one of them and casually snapping his neck with the other arm. And then It rose again, now holding the soldier’s pistol, and levelled it at the other soldiers, despite the fact that one of them had just shot It in the lower leg. Hopper let out an utterly silent, utterly unnoticed yell of pain as he felt the muscles tear and the blood begin to spill out, but It did not care, did not fall. Instead, quite calmly, it shot one of the soldiers through the eye, and – as another two bullets ripped into It, these ones in the other leg – strode across to the final soldier, and knocked the gun from his hands.  


“Please,” the soldier began, but It did not listen, simply shooting him in the head and stepping calmly over the body to finish off the first soldier, who was trying to climb to his feet.  


The whole process, Hopper realised through the throbbing pain of the bullet wounds, had taken perhaps five seconds.  


It stalked over to the back of the military truck, and stared out of the gap between the sheets of canvas, and Hopper stared with it. They were still driving, despite everything that had just happened; either the drivers had not heard the fight, or – more likely – they were under strict orders not to stop for anything. Besides, Hopper thought to himself, they would certainly not suspect that all four soldiers had just been killed by the perfectly friendly and cooperative alien entity in the back of their truck.  


It did not look like a particularly quiet or slow road – if Hopper had had to guess, he would have said that they were somewhere in upstate Virginia – but It did not seem to care, for It retrieved a combat knife from one of the corpses, and tore a large, jagged hole in the canvas, and quite casually stepped out of the moving vehicle.  


Hopper blacked out for a few moments, with the shock of the landing proving too much, and when he had returned to his senses, they were sitting several yards away, in the long grass. The truck was nowhere to be seen, and every so often, another car would pass, but nobody seemed to notice the bloodied, bruised man by the side of the road.  


For a moment, he wondered why all that had happened. It had managed to make its way into the good counsels of Beeching; It was on its way to Washington, where it was going to try and take down one of its key rivals. It had not needed to do any of that. And then he realised – the tapes of the interview would do enough damage in the short-term, and Beeching had served his purpose in opening that Gate and letting the two of them back into the real world. The petty power struggles in the American government – of course that was not the sort of game It was here to play.  


It had somewhere else it wanted to be.  


*******

“Let’s try again,” said Powell, staring across the table at Mike. “What the hell happened, Wheeler?”  


Mike rolled his eyes, and lifted his arm – as much as he could, at least – to point at his face. It wasn’t hurting any more. It wasn’t actually producing any sensation whatsoever, thanks to the painkillers, and felt rather like the left-hand side of his head had been turned into marshmallow or something like that.  


“I got attacked,” he mumbled through a half-numb mouth. “Troy Walsh. Beat me up and stabbed me with a switchblade.”  


Powell nodded. “Yeah, that’s what you said before. Shall we try a bit harder with the ‘why’ of the matter this time?”  


He did not sound, Mike reflected, like someone who cared all that much that there was a fifteen-year-old with his face gashed open sitting across from him. Powell, apparently, had passed the point of caring very much either way by this point in the evening, or possibly this point in his career.  


“What did I say last time?” said Mike instead, for he was honestly struggling to recall.  


“You told me that Troy Walsh was acting under instructions from the ghost of his dead friend,” said Powell, his tone neutral, “and that he’d been wanting to get revenge on you since 1983, because he thought you were hanging around with a psychic.”  


“Yeah,” said Mike. “That checks out.”  


“Are you sticking with that story?”  


Mike sighed, and shook his head. “How about this? He’s been a bully since fourth grade at least, and spent several years of his life tormenting me, and then I stopped being scared of him, so he decided to try and punish me for that. Can’t you just write that he’s a psychopath, and be done with it?”  


Powell pursed his lips, and then said, “How about if I just put ‘school rivalry’?”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, flatly. “That’s just perfect. Really captures the essence of the situation.”  


Powell did not appear to register the sarcasm, as he wrote something down in his notes, and then closed them, and looked up at Mike, seeming to notice him for the first time. “You were lucky that the Chief found you when he did, you know. Lucky he was in the area.”  


“I’ve noticed that,” said Mike. If he bit his lip on the numb side, he observed, it felt exactly like biting a gummy bear. “Troy wasn’t going to stop, you know. This wasn’t just some playground squabble; this was either attempted murder or at least attempted torture. He had a knife, and came looking for me, and took me to a place with no witnesses. Write that down, if it makes any difference.”  


Powell shrugged, and wrote it, and then jerked his head towards the rest of the police station. “We’d better be getting you home now, Wheeler. It’s well past midnight.”  


They stood – Mike’s sides protested, for the painkiller had apparently not reached as far as the places that Troy had kicked him with heavy boots – and walked out to the main reception area, and Mike blinked, for sitting there quite calmly on one of the seats was Mr Clarke.  


“What are you doing here, sir?” he said automatically.  


“Mike!” said Mr Clarke, glancing up and noticing him. “Good grief – your face –“  


“Oh, it’s all completely under control, sir,” said Mike. “Officer Powell wrote down that it was a school rivalry, so they’ll have Troy brought to justice in a matter of minutes. Why are you here?”  


“Well,” said Mr Clarke, blinking with surprise at this revelation, “I was hoping to talk to Chief Waxham, actually, since I’ve got a few questions about various things, but he doesn’t appear to be around at the moment.”  


“It’s past midnight, Scott,” said Powell, wearily. “Waxham’s not coming back tonight, if he’s got any sense. Why can’t you just wait until later?”  


Mr Clarke weighed this up for a moment, and then nodded, looking slightly deflated. “I suppose you’re right. I’ll be here tomorrow morning, then. Mike, are you actually alright?”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, shrugging. “Painkillers, so…”  


Mr Clarke nodded. “Is your mother on her way to collect you?”  


“She can’t be reached,” said Powell. “Nobody answered the phone when we tried.”  


“I’ll drive him back, if you like,” said Mr Clarke. “It’s on my way, after all.”  


“Thanks, Scott,” said Powell. “Much appreciated. Now, I’m going to go and sleep terribly in the back room. See you tomorrow morning.”  


Mr Clarke waved as they left. Mike did not. His arm felt much heavier than it normally did, and it was unsettling him.  


Once they had climbed into Mr Clarke’s car – and even though Mike’s brain felt sluggish, like he had been awake for a continuous twenty-four hours, he did not waste the opportunity to look around, since Dustin would be fascinated to find out what the great man kept on his back seats – and pulled out of the parking lot at the police station, Mike broke the silence.  


“What did you want to ask Waxham about?” he said.  


“Oh, nothing that interesting,” said Mr Clarke. “Just some documents.”  


“But it’s the middle of the night,” said Mike. “Must have been urgent, right? And if you needed the Chief, rather than just Powell, then they must have been pretty important documents too.”  


Mr Clarke was silent for a moment, and then he chuckled ruefully.  


“This is what happens when you teach them to be curious,” he muttered to himself, but there was a hint of pride in his voice. “You’re right, Mike. I was conducting some research into various phenomena happening in Hawkins in recent weeks, and wanted to take a look at certain reports from a few years ago, during all of that confusion with Will.”  


Mike froze slightly in his seat. He was not sure how good he would be at lying at the moment, in his current condition.  


“In particular,” said Mr Clarke, “I was looking at reports to do with the presence of the federal agents at the quarry, where they found the fake body or whatever the official story ended up being.”  


“Why the quarry?” said Mike, thrown somewhat.  


Mr Clarke took a deep breath. “Because, Mike, I have a suspicion that there may be some psychoactive substance in the Hawkins water supply. Water from the quarry flows underground through to Lovers’ Lake, where the municipal water supply is drawn from, and so if the federal agents deposited – either deliberately or inadvertently – some substance with these properties in the lake when they were retrieving the fake body, possibly as a means of convincing people of its veracity, then it may well have made its way into our homes and our bodies.”  


“Interesting,” said Mike, slowly. “What’s your evidence, sir?”  


Mr Clarke let out another surprised chuckle. “Come on, Mike. This is Hawkins. You know as well as I do that some strange things have been happening here over the last few years.”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, “but what specifically? And why now?”  


“Well,” said Mr Clarke, absently scratching at his moustache. “there’s the Starcourt incident, of course, where forty-eight people appeared to suffer some kind of mass delusion and made their way to an unsafe structure in the middle of the night. I suspected ergotism, at first – remind me to tell you about the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1516 at some point – but none of my tests on that have shown any results, so psychoactive substances seemed like the next most plausible explanation. This would also fit with the occasional reports of people claiming to have witnessed supernatural occurrences, as well – your classmate Mr Walsh, and a couple of others, have all made reports which appear to genuinely suggest that there are people with psychic powers in this town. Also, I’m sure you’ve noticed the general state of the school at the moment; not a day goes by when people aren’t complaining of amnesia, or paranoia, or other such things. Some kind of LSD or psilocybin derivative would probably produce this effect, I would imagine, so now I’m trying to find out whether there’s any record of exactly what happened with Will’s doppelgänger.”  


“But why now?” said Mike. “I mean, this has been going on for ages, sir. How come it’s so urgent?”  


Mr Clarke paused, and then said, “I’d appreciate it if this could stay between you and me, Mike. The reason for my urgency is that I’m quite concerned about my own safety, since I believe that I may have been affected by the unknown substance, and the effects of this appear to be intensifying at a non-linear rate, so I’d very much like to work it out before my mind succumbs to delusions.”  


“Oh,” said Mike. “Ah. Sir, why do you think you’ve been affected?”  


“Because,” said Mr Clarke, “I’ve been experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations, of Bob Newby, with increasing frequency over the last few weeks.”  


Mike could not think of anything to say.  


“I don’t believe this is merely a result of grief,” continued Mr Clarke. “I miss Bob every day, of course – he was my oldest and my closest friend, after all – but I believed that I had made peace with his death, come to terms with it. The possibility should not be excluded, of course, but when this is stacked up against everything else that has been happening here since Will went missing…”  


Mike was silent still, for there was a silent debate raging in his mind. One side – very much the continuity camp here – wanted to keep quiet about everything, to reassure Mr Clarke that it would probably all sort itself out, and to allow himself to be driven home and be cared for by his mother. And then there was the other side, which had several unrelated points: that Mr Clarke deserved to know the truth about Hawkins after spending so long on the margins; that he could not face trying to explain the attack to his mother quite yet, when he had not felt entirely comfortable in his own home any more since January; and that he needed to act now, rather than just to let things happen and let himself be the passive object of circumstances. He needed to make up his mind, to make a decision, to take the lead and lead the charge against the ghosts or whatever was happening this time around.  


“Mike?” said Mr Clarke, sounding faintly concerned.  


And then he remembered what Max had told him, back in January. _You don’t need to do everything alone._  


“Sorry,” said Mike. “Miles away. Look, sir, if it’s OK, could you drive me to Lucas’s house instead? There’s some things that you should probably know.”  


*******

The man emerged from the mouth of the tunnel, and he was pointing a gun quite calmly at the two of them.  


Dustin froze, and he could feel Steve doing the same as well. Somehow, being back in the Russian base made the threat feel much more tangible, closer at hand, as though his brain had designated this as the dangerous place.  


“Keep your hands on your head,” said the man. His accent was thick – New Jersey, Dustin thought, or something like that – and he spoke in a tone of one who had the situation under control. “I don’t want any sudden moves from either of you.”  


“Who are you?” said Steve, sounding utterly bemused by the situation. He had a point, Dustin silently accepted; this man was not merely wearing plainclothes, but a Hawaiian shirt over a thick sweater, and black jeans. The men in the Power and Light vans, back when they had been around, had been smartly dressed, often with official identification; whoever this person was, he clearly was not holding himself to the same sartorial standards.  


“Never mind who I am,” said the man. “Who the hell are you?”  


“Troy Walsh,” said Dustin, confidently.  


“And I’m…Marty,” said Steve, less confidently. “Marty Mc…Marty McDonald. That’s me.”  


“The fuck you are,” said the man. “But that’s not what I meant. Who are you working for?”  


“Who are you working for?” said Steve, hopefully.  


“I told you,” said the man, levelling the gun at Steve. “I’m asking the questions here.”  


“It’s OK,” said Dustin. “I can work it out. You’re not with Brenner’s old team, because then you wouldn’t be sneaking around looking at copies of his old research notes; you’d have taken them with you when you left. You’re not with the Russians, because you don’t recognise either of us, and they’d have definitely let you know that we were problems to be aware of if they were sending you back here. You’re not with Beeching, because if he wanted to investigate what was happening here, he could have sent in soldiers, and you’re not even slightly a soldier. So, process of elimination, must be Owens. Which means that we’re on your side, so you can stop pointing the gun at us.”  


The man blinked in surprise at this monologue, which he had evidently not expected, but recovered quickly. “Sure, because there are only four powers in the entire world. Makes sense. But thanks for telling me who you’re working for, kid.”  


“Fuck’s sake, Dustin,” complained Steve, and then groaned slightly in disappointment as he realised his blunder.  


“And thanks for telling me his name, ‘Marty’,” said the man, smirking. “Good team, you two.”  


“Look,” said Dustin, “why are you here?”  


“Same reason I suspect you are,” said the man. “I’m here to see what the fuck is going on in Hawkins these days. And, more to the point, what this monstrosity is.”  


He gesticulated, somewhat carelessly, with the gun at the structure behind them, the vast array of test tubes and glass cylinders and electrolysis chambers, and the isolation tank behind it, under the light of the glowing red wall.  


“Wait,” said Steve, “so you didn’t build that?”  


The man’s face went blank for a moment, and then he shrugged. “Ah, what the hell. No, I didn’t, and apparently nor did you. Someone else is doing this. Any idea what it is?”  


“I’ll tell you,” said Dustin, slowly, cautiously, “if you tell us who you’re working for, and what your name is.”  


The man considered this for a moment, and then nodded. “Eddie Vincenzo. Pleasure to meet you, Dustin, Joey.”  


“Nobody said I was called Joey,” said Steve, seeming oddly affronted.  


“Yeah,” said Vincenzo, smirking, “but you look like a Joey.”  


“And who are you working for?” said Dustin.  


Vincenzo shrugged again. “Anyone who’ll pay me for this, really. I’ve got a contract with someone in the People’s Republic of China, and an arrangement with someone working for France. Unofficially, possibly South Africa as well, if they pay up on time. I was hoping to sell this to Britain as well, but they’re having some pointless civil war in their government over military helicopters at the moment, so I might have to wait a bit there.”  


“So, hang on,” said Steve, “you’re a mercenary? Like, a spy mercenary?”  


“I prefer freelancer,” said Vincenzo, grinning slightly. “But yes, essentially.”  


“And you came to Hawkins –“  


“Because everyone’s curious, Joey. All the kings and princes of the whole wide world, they’re just dying to know what’s been happening here in Indiana this whole time. They’ve heard the rumours about alternate dimensions, other worlds, and they’re wondering how to get in on that game.”  


Dustin nodded, thinking through the implications of this. Gates in every country, Demogorgons in hundreds of small towns. Thousands of Wills and Barbs. He should have expected this, really.  


“You heard of MKUltra?” he said, instead.  


Vincenzo nodded. “Of course. Every conspiracy nut and spy in the country knows about MKUltra. Worst-kept national secret since Watergate. What’s that got to do with the price of margarine?”  


“Because they were working on it here,” said Dustin. “I mean, not here here, but in the Lab, up above. Martin Brenner carried on with the program until 1983, and now somebody’s trying to start it up again. That’s what all this equipment is.”  


“I saw the notes upstairs,” said Vincenzo, nodding. “Whoever left them also built this. Presumably, same person that left the rope here to climb up to the tunnel, and whoever broke the window.”  


“What window?” said Steve.  


“The one that I used to get into the Lab just now, and presumably you did too,” said Vincenzo. “Broken from the inside – don’t know if you noticed – which means that whoever it was entered from this side, and then made their way into the Lab, and headed out from there.”  


Dustin nodded. “So, they must have come in through the Starcourt entrance. That’s where this base connects to, the old mall.”  


“Yeah, the Russian one,” said Vincenzo. “I know all this stuff, kid. I’ve done my research. Owens’s coverup wasn’t exactly a work of art. Let’s take a look at all this science shit.”  


He escorted the two of them down the metal stairs, down to the foot of the platform. Water, dark water, was running across the floor there, an underground river with no discernible source or destination, and they stepped gingerly over it, towards the glowing red wall.  


“It’s hot,” said Steve, as they approached it. “Feels like it’s burning. Where’s the heat coming from?”  


“Hypothesis,” said Dustin, “from the Upside-Down. Or the aftereffects of the Gate, at least.”  


“It’s what they’re using to power those flames, by the looks of it,” said Vincenzo casually, pointing towards the experimental equipment. “And the electricity. Figure it can’t be easy getting a power cable down here.”  


Dustin nodded, but did not say anything. He was too busy staring at the shimmering liquids in their glass containers, wondering what they might be. It was a complicated series of reactions, all apparently quite precisely controlled by a byzantine structure of valves and thermometers, and somehow, it was supposed to lead to psychic powers, or at least some kind of hormone which Brenner had apparently identified in El’s brain.  


Before he had met Martin Brenner, Dustin reflected, he had always believed that the scientists were always the good guys. He had listened to Carl Sagan and Mr Clarke telling him about the nobility of the search for knowledge, the beauty of the struggle for scientific truth, the inevitability of progress. Even after 1983, he’d still clung to this (he’d rescued Dart in the name of Science with a capital S, hadn’t he?), and it had only been in the past few months that doubt had begun to creep in once again.  


After all, it was a lot harder to claim that Brenner had been a single bad apple when other scientists, in Russia and Ansted and now apparently in four or five other countries, had started to engage themselves in the same project. It was significantly less likely that scientists were men of truth, acolytes of an international principle of knowledge, when everywhere they were being directed by governments to accomplish whatever military task deemed most appropriate. And the claim that progress was inevitable, that history moved in one direction only, seemed a lot more ominous in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.  


No, he thought. Science could be used for whatever purpose people saw fit. For every smallpox vaccine, there was an isolation tank with a child inside it. For every moon rocket, there was a nuclear warhead. It was all a question of power, really.  


Steve and Vincenzo were talking, and he moved back to join them, and then froze in fear. For there, in the distance, at the end of a corridor, was the faintest hint of moving light in the darkness.  


“Guys,” he hissed, directing their attention to it, and they turned, and saw the same.  


“Shit,” said Vincenzo, raising his gun again.  


“Who is it?” said Steve.  


“Fuck only knows,” said Vincenzo. “But he’s on his way. Owens warned me I probably wouldn’t have long undetected.”  


“Oh, so you are working for Owens after all, then?” said Steve.  


Vincenzo shrugged. “One of many clients. He pays well. Dustin, Joey, get behind me.”  


“Why?” said Dustin suspiciously.  


“Because I don’t want you getting in the way of the bullets,” said Vincenzo. “I’m a spy, not a psychopath. I’d prefer kids not to get hurt, if I can help it.”  


And then there was a blinding flash of light, purest white, and a deafening bang, and Dustin felt the insides of his eyes protest with a stabbing pain, and when his vision returned after a few seconds, it was somewhat blurry and indistinct. But he could make out the shape of the figure striding confidently towards them down the corridor, and as his vision slowly began to clear, he recognised him.  


“Drop your gun and get down on the floor,” said the man, his voice supremely confident. “This is Police Chief David Waxham, which basically means that you're going to do as I say. Get down on the floor and tell me what you’re doing here.”  


Vincenzo was frozen to the spot, and then he began to move, and Dustin had no idea whether he was moving to stand down or to attack, but he never found out, because a gunshot rang out with a deafening burst of sound, and Vincenzo slumped to the floor, lifeless. Waxham, calmly, lowered his gun, but did not look any less threatening for it.  


“What –“ began Steve, sounding almost shell-shocked.  


“He was about to attack me,” said Waxham, sounding relaxed. “Believe me, son, I’m a cop. I know hostile action when I see it. Now what are the pair of you doing down here?”  


“We were outside the Lab,” said Dustin, “and we stumbled upon him, and he took us hostage.” It was a gamble, but the only conceivable innocent answer that he could think of.  


“How did you find us?” said Steve, who seemed – mercifully – to have figured out Dustin’s line here.  


“Got calls from a couple of your friends,” said Waxham. “Said that they were concerned about where you might be, so I came looking.”  


Steve nodded, but Dustin did not.  


“But they didn’t know where we were,” he said, to himself as much as to anyone else in the red chamber. “I didn’t tell anyone that we were going to come here tonight, and even if I had, they wouldn’t have called the cops. And even if they had, then you’d have gone to the Lab, not to Starcourt…”  


He trailed off. It was obvious, really.  


“Oh,” said Steve, who had also apparently figured it out.  


“You’re the other spy, aren’t you,” said Dustin to Waxham, and he knew that he was right.  


*******

Nancy unlocked the front door and strode through into the kitchen, and almost walked into her mother sitting there in silence, half a glass of red wine in front of her.  


“Mom,” said Nancy, in surprise, “how come you’re still up?”  


Karen looked up at her, around two seconds after Nancy had finished speaking, and she saw red and stained eyes. “It’s perfectly alright, Nancy. I was just struggling to sleep, so I thought I’d give it another go in an hour or so.”  


Nancy was almost tempted to nod, and accept this at face value, and head upstairs to her room – for that was where the real work needed to be done, after all – but something stopped her, and that something was Jasna’s echoing voice in her mind, echoing with worry and outrage and something almost close to revulsion. _I’m not cold enough yet._  


Instead, she pulled out another seat at the dining table, and sat.  


“It’s about Dad, isn’t it?” she said, and her mother nodded.  


“Of course it’s about Ted,” said Karen, attempting a kind of half-smile. “I’m sorry, Nancy. I really am. I know the last month has been pretty hard for you. The last few years, even. I know you heard us fighting sometimes.”  


Nancy nodded apologetically. “Yeah. But it’s OK. It’s not your fault, Mom.”  


“Isn’t it?” said Karen. “There’s two people in every marriage, Nancy. Both people need to be trying to make it work, and after a certain point, you know, I just stopped.”  


“Why?” said Nancy.  


Her mother only shook her head. “Do you know, I really don’t know. I don’t know what it was that did it, what made me realise that there was no hope for the marriage in the long term, but I did. I just gave up, and decided that repairs were frankly beyond me even if Ted seemed interested in doing that – in doing anything –“ this was delivered in a somewhat more barbed tone than the rest of the sentence – “so I let things just happen to me, or happen around me, and tried to make myself comfortable with the idea that this was how my life was now.”  


She was staring, not at Nancy, but at the wine glass, observing it with some disdain.  


“It was almost a surprise when he left, you know,” she continued. “I was just starting to become accustomed to things. I thought he was too. I thought we’d negotiated our own separate spheres in the house, found a way to work around one another, but no, he just left one day while you were in Virginia. Sovereign offered him a promotion, offered him more pay and more influence, and he took it, because he said that was what you were supposed to do when you got a promotion. That was how the country worked, he said – meritocracy and social mobility and all that. And they needed him on short notice, so he just packed a bag and left, didn’t even wait for you and Mike to come back so he could say goodbye. That was the thing that offended me the most, I think.”  


Nancy glanced away, but nodded slightly. “Yeah. I think Mike took it pretty badly as well. He told me, when I got back, that it felt like Dad just didn’t care about us. Like he didn’t love us.”  


Karen Wheeler sighed, and there was a story of many years in that sigh. “He did, Nancy. He truly did. But he didn’t know how to say so, and he never wanted to learn.”  


“But why not?” said Nancy. “If you love someone, you tell them. And if that’s too hard or too awkward, then you can at least be there for them when they want it, when they need it. And he never was, Mom, he never was.”  


“Nancy,” said her mother, and the sadness had not left her tone, “you have to understand how it was for him. And for me, at that. When we grew up, it was a very different time, with different rules and standards. It was all very set in stone, back then, what people could and couldn’t do, what everybody’s role was. Men would grow up and get jobs, climb the ladder and provide for their families. Women would grow up and become mothers, run the house and care for their children. It was so very neat and tidy.”  


Automatically, she took another sip at the wine, and then grimaced, and put the glass down on the table with more force than was necessary.  


“That was how we always wanted to do things, me and Ted,” she continued. “We’d spent all our childhoods learning about the American way of life, about the house in the suburbs and the children and the chicken pies for dinner every Sunday evening. How were we supposed to realise that the world couldn’t work that way? How was anyone?”  


“I know, I know,” said Nancy, quietly. “I get it, Mom. I understand. People haven’t stopped, you know. They got the 1960s, and youth revolution, and idealism and hope and the Beatles, and then they just gave it all up one day and got a job in finance. Revolution deferred indefinitely, reform forgotten because it’s inconvenient, optimism placed on hold because it’s too much effort to dream up a better world when you’re working the nine-to-five. We’re not doing any better, Mom, we’re still getting trapped in the same cultural traps and the same gender roles and the same cycles that you did, this whole generation.”  


“But _you_ haven’t,” said Karen. “You haven’t yet, Nancy. There’s still hope for you, and for Mike, and for Holly. And I’m so proud of you for not giving up yet. You can be different, you know, this time.”  


Nancy smiled slightly, and blinked a few times to clear her vision. “You really think so?”  


“Oh, yes,” said Karen, smiling as well. “I know you can. Ted knew it as well; he was proud of you as well, even if he never thought he was supposed to do anything about that pride. If I could go back to childhood, do things differently, be braver and more rebellious and less willing to let the world just walk over me, then I don’t know if I would, because you three have made it all seem worth it. If you can change the world, Nancy, if you can live a better life than I did, then I’ll have done my job better than I could have ever hoped for.”  


There was no hiding the welling of tears at the corner of her eyes now, or indeed those in Nancy’s eyes either.  


“Come on, Mom,” she said, standing up and offering her hand. “Let’s get you to bed. And let’s get rid of that wine; it can’t be helping that much.”  


“No,” said her mother, smiling, “it’s made me get all sentimental, hasn’t it? Pour it down the sink, Nancy, would you?”  


“The glass?”  


“The whole bottle,” said Karen."I think that's probably best, don't you?"  


Several minutes later, Nancy stood on the silent landing, in the darkness. Her mother was in bed, now, at last, and seemed to have fallen asleep almost as soon as she made it there. Holly was fast asleep as well – Nancy had checked on her just to be sure – and Mike was out, but he’d left a note on his desk for her, telling her that he was up at Weathertop to call El and Will. Perhaps he was still there, or perhaps he’d gone to stay with Lucas or Dustin.  


Somewhere out there in the darkness, there were ghosts, she knew. She’d seen Heather Holloway, just for a second, but that had been enough; she’d seen the Holloway house twist and bend around itself, seen it beckon Robin into some endless void, seen it weather away and die in the space of minutes. She’d heard the walls of the house whispering the same message that danced across the sky in the form of radio waves, and she’d listened to Robin’s explanation about Heather trying to make her tell some unknown secret to her again and again. She’d found the ghosts of Hawkins, worked out where they were choosing to haunt.  


She’d watched, observed, collected her data and constructed her plan. She’d walked away from Jasna, and possibly from Robin if the other girl was still alive, in the name of the bigger picture. She could not delay herself any longer, or her opportunity might fade away.  


She closed her eyes for a second, and then opened them, and strode into her room, and – without needing to look to the corner of the room, to the figure standing there – said, “Hello, Barb.”  


*******

The phone rang, and Will almost jumped out of his skin, before he realised what it was.  


Josh, who was sitting in the other armchair, had apparently done exactly the same, judging by the sheepish look on his face as he glanced around him. Jonathan began to move towards it, but then slowed to a halt.  


“Should I answer it?” he said, to the room in general.  


“Don’t risk it,” said Murray. “It’s probably them. That little army of possessed people out there.”  


“Why would they be phoning us?” said Josh, who recoiled slightly from the glare Murray shot at him.  


“Basic espionage tactic, kid,” said Murray. “Find out whether your targets are at home or not.”  


“They know we’re here, though,” said Will. “Surely. If they’ve got any sense. The truck that saved us was parked outside all night, and we’ve had the lights on. If they were observing the house, then they don’t need to phone, and they must have had someone in the vicinity at least.”  


“I’m answering it,” said Jonathan, reaching towards it again, but the phone – having completed its designated eight rings – fell silent, going to an unanswered voicemail message, and he lowered his arm in disappointment, and began to walk back to the sofa. No sooner had he sat down than the phone began to ring again, and – somewhat wearily – Jonathan stood again, and trudged across the room (ignoring Murray’s disapproving expression), and picked it up.  


“Hello?” he said, and then furrowed his brow in concern. “No, she’s not here. She’s gone to the hospital.”  


There was a brief pause. “Yes, at this time. What do you mean?”  


“Who is it?” said Will, making his way over to the phone, with Josh following him.  


“It’s Mike,” said Jonathan. “And the others as well. Here –“ he pressed the speakerphone button on the handset, and held it up to the two of them.  


“ _Hello?_ ” came Mike’s voice, sounding slightly muffled. “ _Jonathan, can you still hear me?_ ”  


“Loud and clear, Mike,” said Jonathan, rolling his eyes. “I’ve put you on speaker. Will and Josh are here; Mom’s taken El to the hospital.”  


“ _What happened?_ ” said Mike, and Will was not sure whether to admire or roll his eyes at the immediate concern in his tone. “ _Is she alright?_ ”  


“She’s fine,” said Will. “Well, sort of. Her nose won’t stop bleeding, but her powers aren’t back yet.”  


“ _Will,_ ” said Mike, and his tone sounded different, somehow – penitent, but not quite in the same way as usual. “ _Hey. I was trying to call you, earlier – did you hear me?_ ”  


Will shook his head, and then remembered that Mike could not see him. “Nothing, I’m afraid. When was this?”  


“ _Two hours ago, maybe?_ ” said Mike. “ _I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Do you know why El’s nose started bleeding?_ ”  


“Yeah,” said Josh, in a bizarrely deep voice. “She tried to reactivate her powers, since the Vestige had cornered us, and knocked herself unconscious in so doing. When we revived her, the nosebleed started.”  


A series of incomprehensible mumbling issued from the other end of the phone, sounding like Mike badly trying to summarise the situation to the others. While he did, Will turned to Josh, and said, “What are you doing?”  


“What do you mean?”  


“Your voice. You were doing a weird voice just then. All deep and confident and stuff, when you were talking to Mike there.”  


Josh’s eyes flickered around the room. “Was I? Was that…not how I normally talk?”  


“Just talk in your normal voice,” said Will, in slight confusion. “It’s nice. I mean, it’s fine.”  


Josh glanced away, his face reddening slightly.  


“ _Will?_ ” said another voice from the phone, that of Max. “ _I’ve put us on speaker as well, so that Mike doesn’t have to try and play the middleman when half of his face is numb from painkillers. How bad was the bleeding?_ ”  


“I don’t know,” said Will. “Not any worse than how it normally was, I don’t think. But it wouldn’t stop.”  


“ _But it seemed urgent enough to take her to hospital in the middle of the night?_ ” said Lucas.  


“No,” said Josh, who had mercifully returned to his usual tone, albeit coloured by a faint confusion. “This was this morning, around eightish or thereabouts. She hasn’t been gone that long.”  


There was a silence from the other end of the phone for a moment.  


“ _What did you say?_ ” said Max. “ _She left at eight? Like, eight in the morning?_ ”  


“ _Will,_ ” said Mike, with worry in his voice, “ _what time is it where you are at the moment?_ ”  


Will glanced at the clock on the wall. “Around quarter past eleven. There’s no daylight saving time difference at the moment for you, is there?”  


There was another pause, and then Lucas spoke, his voice cautious. “ _Will. It’s still the middle of the night here._ ”  


“But that’s not possible,” said Josh. “Sorry, but – it’s been sunny here for a couple of hours, at least, and you’re not that far away from us –“  


“ _I’m looking at the clock on my wall now,_ ” said Lucas. “ _It’s around two o’clock. And pitch-black outside._ ”  


“What does this mean?” said Jonathan, whose face had gone somewhat pale. “You guys, in Hawkins – has anything happened tonight?”  


“ _Yes,_ ” said three voices at once, and then after some mumbling, Max said, “ _Lucas and I got chased by that monster from back at Christmas, the one that attacked the bus. And Mike picked up a weird radio signal, and then got stabbed by Troy._ ”  


“What?” said Will, feeling the situation slide slightly further out of his grasp. “Mike – you got stabbed?”  


“ _Only a bit,_ ” said Mike, whose painkiller-muffled voice was starting to make sense now. “ _Well, OK, quite a lot, I guess. Troy cornered me, beat me up, and was carving something on my face when someone rescued me. Then Mr Clarke gave me a ride from the police station to Lucas’s. He’s here now, by the way. Oh, and also, we think there are a bunch of ghosts in Hawkins._ ”  


Will took a deep breath. “Mike. Lucas. Max. What the fuck is going on?”  


“ _We don’t know_ ,” said Lucas. “ _And Mr Clarke wants you to mind your language, by the way._ ”  


“ _I didn’t say anything like that,_ ” said the voice of Mr Clarke, which was almost one level of weirdness too much for Will to handle. “ _And it’s very nice to hear from you again, Will; I hope you’re all well. Although, I suppose, it sounds like you might not be, if you’re…being attacked by something?_ ”  


____

“It’s the remains of the Mind Flayer,” explained Jonathan. “It tried to steal Will’s memories and kill the others last night, and then some punks from Chicago saved them. Trust me, it makes sense in context, sir.”  


____

“ _Yes, so these three keep assuring me,_ ” said Mr Clarke in a somewhat defeated tone of voice.  


____

“ _Never mind that,_ ” said Max. “ _What the fuck is going on with the time? How’s that happening?_ ”  


____

“It’s either something weird here in Winterton, or something in Hawkins,” said Josh. “How do we work out which?”  


____

“ _Has anyone come in or out of Winterton recently?_ ” said Mr Clarke. “ _If this is a classic example of time dilation – for instance, in close proximity to a black hole – then time should be moving slower in the dilated region, which would suggest that Hawkins is the site of the anomaly. On the other hand, apparently none of this necessarily has to make any scientific sense, so…_ ” He trailed off.  


____

“Murray?” said Jonathan. “You arrived yesterday evening. Was there anything weird that you noticed with the clocks?”  


____

Murray glanced up from the newspaper he was calmly reading at the table. “Oh, I'm part of this too? Nope. Nothing. Also, Sinclair, have you read those books yet?”  


____

“ _Most of them,_ ” said Lucas. “ _Just threw one of them at a monster. What’s that got to do with this?_ ”  


____

“Oh, nothing,” said Murray, returning to the newspaper. “Just seemed more interesting to me than talking about time dilation.”  


____

“ _So,_ ” said Mike, ignoring him, “ _there’s something wrong with Hawkins. Obviously. Should probably have guessed that._ ”  


____

“Well,” said Josh, “in fairness, there seems to be something wrong with Winterton as well. Just not the sort of thing that actively causes time to slow down around us.”  


____

“ _The Vestige, you called it,_ ” said Mr Clarke. “ _How many people has it possessed?_ ”  


____

“Lots,” said Josh.  


____

“At least twenty,” said Will, hoping that this would be a more helpful answer. “Possibly more, but that’s how many ambushed us last night, at least.”  


____

“ _Tell us about the people,_ ” said Lucas. “ _Any connection? Or just random?_ ”  


____

“We did some research,” said Josh, “before all of this. A lot of them were marked as having gone missing for a couple of days, before returning. Different ages, different parts of town. No family connections or bonds of friendship, as far as we could tell. Diverse occupations – there was a dockworker, and a janitor, and one of the bar staff, and a couple of people who worked at the biscuit factory over in Martham, and an old lady who does people’s gardens, and several more. They tried to get Maria’s dad, as well. It seems random, basically.”  


____

“You sure?” said Murray, who had put the paper down somewhere in the middle of that monologue. “Sinclair, are you hearing this?”  


____

“ _Yeah,_ ” said Lucas, “ _but I don’t see the – oh…_ ”  


____

He trailed off in comprehension, and Murray smiled what seemed to be an almost genuine, if cynical, smile.  


____

“ _What is it?_ ” said Mike. “ _What’s the connection?_ ”  


____

“ _Class, Mike,_ ” said Lucas. “ _All working class. Out of twenty people, you shouldn’t expect that much consistency. It’s targeting the workers of Winterton – the easy targets, the people who don’t have the protection that others do, or the security, or the stability. Inside and outside._ ”  


____

“The desperate people,” said Will, quietly, as he realised. “The people who are struggling, the people who are suffering. He likes it cold, you see.”  


____

There was a long silence on the line between them, and then a muffled sound in the background.  


____

“What’s that?” said Jonathan. “Was that you?”  


____

“ _Someone’s knocking at the door,_ ” said Lucas, confused. “ _Despite it being two in the morning here. They won’t stop knocking._ ”  


____

“ _We should go,_ ” said Mike. “ _They might be involved with all of this. We probably shouldn’t have used the phone anyway._ ”  


____

“You’re right,” said Will. “Keep us updated, though. Not much we’ve got to lose at this point, I think.”  


____

“ _Yeah,_ ” said Mike, and then, “ _Will? When this is over – or, you know, as over as it ever gets – can we talk? Just the two of us?_ ”  


____

“Maybe,” said Will, as his stomach began to churn. “Depends. What about?”  


____

“ _Apologising,_ ” said Mike, quietly. “ _I think I get it now, and I want things to be alright between us again. I want to go back to the way things were._ ”  


____

“Yeah,” said Will. “I’ll talk to you. And I’m not angry, you know, or anything like that. But, Mike – listen – the way things were before the summer, I don’t want to go back to that. I’m not going back.”  


____

Perhaps Mike was going to say something, but there was a sudden and almighty clattering from the other end of the phone, and the sound of Lucas and Max both swearing in shock and fear.  


____

“What is it?” said Josh. “Are you guys alright?”  


____

“ _Fine,_ ” said Lucas, but his voice did not support this. “ _But the person knocking – they’re at the window now. It’s Neil Hargrove. He’s here._ ”  


____

There was a click, and a buzz. The connection had cut out.  


____

:

____

*******

____

____

She sat in the darkness, by the ruins of a dead house, and waited.  


____

It was fairly cold there, on the edge of town, and Jasna drew her coat tightly around her and shivered, listening to the sounds of the night. She had no idea what they might be – owls, perhaps, or crickets, or nighthawks? – for the nocturnal soundscape she was used to was that of quiet traffic on the distant freeways, and the occasional car alarm.  


____

Washington still seemed very close, really. Not in distance – it had been a long drive, all those weeks ago, although it was still only a small fraction of the width of the continent – but in memory. The last month had felt more like a temporary respite than a new situation, in a way, and there were still times when she woke in the darkness of the Wheelers’ basement and was convinced that she was back in her apartment, her parents only a room away.  


____

But this – this was something that she would never have been able to do in Washington. For one thing, there was greenery around her, trees and long grass and wilderness, stretching away into the night and never once being terminated by office blocks. For another, she was alone in the dark evening, and it had been a long time – possibly her whole life – since that had been even slightly permissible.  


____

The other girls back in Washington, Jen Stanton and Harriet Hastings and that whole crowd, they wouldn’t have found this weird at all. (Or, at least, the sitting outside at midnight; the ghost situation would probably have been received in much the same spirit that Jasna was experiencing it.) They had regularly held parties, at houses and apartments around the city, and from the talk in the corridors the next day, these had been quite lengthy affairs that stretched into the early morning and always generated enough gossip to animate the school for the next week at least. Jasna had never been invited, of course, and would not have been allowed to go if she had – and, indeed, probably would not have wanted to go, although she would have given her right arm just for the invitation. She’d never been allowed, by the civil society of school and by her parents, to do anything like this.  


____

But she was, and she’d chosen it. It would have been very easy to go with Nancy, just like she’d been doing for the past several weeks – the other girl had a strange sort of charisma about her, a burning passionate idealism, and until quite recently, Jasna would have followed her to the ends of the earth based on that alone, even before one factored in the morality of their mission and her deep unspoken hunger for a friend. But she hadn’t; she’d refused, she’d called Nancy out on her behaviour (and where had she found the courage for that?), and she’d firmly determined that she was not leaving without Robin, based on nothing more than the brave and terrified look in Robin’s eyes as she had walked through the door into the darkness. Was this the first time in her life, maybe, that she’d made a decision without anyone else’s influence?  


____

Perhaps Robin was dead. Perhaps she had been taken by Heather Holloway, and would remain in her ghostly realm forever, however that worked. Perhaps staying here was a mistake.  


____

Or, she thought, perhaps continuing to sit by the side of the road, continuing to wait, was the real mistake. Perhaps there was still more that she could do.  


____

Jasna Konstanjević stood, and marched across the moss-covered lawn, and began to dig through the crumbling rubble of the house with her bare hands, throwing the stones behind her with some relish, because she was not letting Robin go without a fight.  


____

____

*******

____

____

Things were happening around her, El vaguely thought, but they did not seem tremendously important, so she ignored them.  


____

Instead, she stared down at the black-and-white pictures in her hands, the ones which Dr Vaudrais had said were pictures of her brain. She could see the damage, now that Dr Vaudrais had pointed it out; there were faint lines and cracks in the area that they had called the medulla oblongata, the unmistakable signs of something having been put under too much strain. She felt like it, too, for she felt different here in the hospital, out of it somehow, with all the voices and movement around her fading into a dull humming greyness, and her mind resolutely refusing to focus on anything unless she forced it to.  


____

But that couldn’t have been the damage, apparently. Dr Vaudrais had said that there was nothing particularly wrong with her brain, that the damage it had suffered in Starcourt had healed in the space of a few weeks, and that the trauma from last night was healing even quicker. It made sense, in a way – after all, she was Brenner’s eleventh attempt to configure the brain properly, not to mention the experiments and research he must surely have carried out before, so it was hardly a surprise that he’d been able to build someone whose brain could repair itself when it was strained too far. Kali had told her, once, back in Chicago when everything seemed confusing and new, that some of their brothers and sisters had been burnt out, extinguished, but it appeared that this was not to be her fate. She was a much better-built weapon than they had been.  


____

And yet the powers were still, stubbornly, absent, and there seemed to be no good explanation presenting itself to her. So she stared at the pictures, glaring with the same angry focus that she would once have been able to lift a table with, and tried to make herself think about it logically, like Mike would have done, and did not manage.  


____

“Hey,” said a voice next to her, and El jumped slightly, turning to see Maria. The other girl was smiling – she was almost always smiling, which made El simultaneously a bit more cheerful and slightly confused about what there was to smile about – but her eyes were blinking a lot, and she was not sitting still, and El recognised instinctively the signs of anxiety.  


____

“Hi,” she said in reply. “What’s wrong?”  


____

Maria blinked, and smiled some more. “Me? I’m not the one who just had their brain scanned, El – how are you doing?”  


____

El shrugged with one shoulder, which was something that Hopper had used to do. “Fine.”  


____

“Don’t you have a whole thing about friends and lying?”  


____

“Alright. Not fine.”  


____

Maria nodded understandingly. “Yeah. Fair.”  


____

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she said, turning her internal monologue into external monologue. “There needs to be a reason. For the powers not being back, that is. But the doctor said that my brain was fine, so am I doing something wrong?”  


____

“I doubt it,” said Maria, biting her lip in thought. “For one thing, it’s definitely not your fault. Also, what would you be doing?”  


____

“Maybe I’ve forgotten,” said El.  


____

“That doesn’t fit, though,” said Maria. “If you were basically healed in the space of a few weeks, at least, that’s not nearly long enough to forget. And you told me, the other day, that you’d been trying to make them work again basically from the moment that you lost them, right?”  


____

El nodded. Reluctantly, she admitted to herself that Maria had a point. “Then what?”  


____

“Here’s what I think,” said Maria. “That picture there, that just shows the actual physical brain inside your head, right?”  


____

“So?”  


____

“So it doesn’t show your thoughts, or, you know, anything that isn’t solid and material. Whatever’s stopping your powers coming back, it must be that kind of problem, I reckon. Something psychological.”  


____

El nodded again, silently, and weighed these words, and then a shadow fell over the two of them.  


____

It was the receptionist from earlier, still wearing the same neutral smile. “Miss Glenny?”  


____

“Yes?” said Maria, springing to her feet with nervous energy.  


____

“They’ve finished work with your father for now,” said the receptionist, “and he’s awake at the moment, so if you’d like to see him, then that should be possible. Just follow me when you’re ready.”  


____

Maria turned to look down at El. “Do you want to come with me?”  


____

El looked back at her friend, and saw the fear, the anxiety, the desperation behind her eyes – the wish for someone to be with her in case she needed support after seeing the state her father was in – and nodded.  


____

____

Once again, they were ushered through long and labyrinthine corridors, past anonymous wooden doors and staircases and offices by the score. The receptionist paused at one of the doors, and opened it to reveal an elevator behind; once the two of them had followed her in, she pushed the button labelled ‘-5’, scanning a keycard as she did, and the elevator quietly began to descend.  


____

“Will Dad be awake?” said Maria, breaking the silence.  


____

“Probably,” said the receptionist, “but he’ll probably be quite tired, Miss Glenny. Our doctors have been working with him all night, trying to get to the bottom of his condition, so don’t be offended if he looks like he’d rather have a nap than talk to you for too long.” She smiled upon completing the sentence, and El wondered how many times she had practiced saying those words for them to come out as smoothly as they had.  


____

The downward motion gradually disappeared, and the receptionist pushed open the door, revealing a corridor that looked almost identical, but for the lack of windows. It was not too far a walk this time – perhaps ten or fifteen doors down the corridor – and the room they were ushered into looked broadly similar to the one she had been scanned in, although a little smaller, with dim blue lights around the corners of the ceiling and several men in white coats standing silently around the edges of the floor.  


____

Lying on a bed, in the centre of the room, was Mr Glenny. El remembered how he had looked, that night in the woods – pale and shivering and terrified – and her immediate reaction was to conclude that, whatever the doctors had done, it had not been enough to make him look any warmer or healthier, even if there was no longer fear in his eyes. But she kept quiet, because this seemed like it would not be a helpful observation, and Maria ran across the room, crouching down by his bedside and apparently trying to say around five different things at once to him.  


____

“Hello, Maria,” said Mr Glenny, his voice weak but amused. “You certainly are a sight for sore eyes here, I must say. They’ve been keeping me underground for two days now, you know?”  


____

“How are you feeling, Dad?” said Maria, who did not seem to be able to decide whether she was supposed to be whispering or not. “Have you been fainting any more?”  


____

“I wish,” said Mr Glenny, still with a smile on his face. “I could do with the sleep. No, that seems to have stopped, but I’d be damned if I could tell you what they’ve been doing to me. Something with a lot of chemicals and machines, I think. Maria, who’s your friend there?”  


____

“Oh, that’s El,” said Maria, offhandedly. “You know, the only female friend I have at school, or anywhere, I guess. She was with me when we found you in the woods back in January, but I guess you still can’t remember that. I know I’ve told you about her, Dad.”  


____

“You have indeed,” said Mr Glenny. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, El. Do excuse me for not standing to greet you.”  


____

El smiled politely. “Pleasure to meet you too.”  


____

Mr Glenny smiled with friendly eyes at her, and then turned back to Maria, and began to ask her about her mother, and an idea came to El, as she observed the oddly domestic scene in front of her, the clear familial bond that made her think about home and her brothers and Joyce and Hopper.  


____

“Excuse me?” she said. “Would you like me to take a picture of the two of you?”  


____

Mr Glenny nodded happily. “That would be lovely, El! Something for you to take home to your mother, Maria, and we can all have a good laugh at it in a few years’ time when we see how useless I look.”  


____

El smiled, and retrieved Jonathan’s camera from inside her coat, flicking the buttons on the top in the way that he had showed her, and stared through the little window until she could clearly see the two Glennys, both smiling awkwardly back at her, and pressed the button with a triumphant click.  


____

“That’s wonderful, El,” said Mr Glenny. “Thank you so much.”  


____

“Can you do another?” said Maria. “With the flash this time, if that’s OK. It’s kind of dark in here.”  


____

El nodded, and spent a few seconds remembering how to achieve this, and then pressed the button. A burst of bright light filled the room, and as it did, there was a piercing sound, a shriek, coming from Mr Glenny.  


____

Blinking the light away, El stared at him, and saw with a flash of shock that his eyes had changed, from a pale blue to a dark and spreading blackness, and his face was contorted in pain. Maria cried out in surprise, and leapt away from him in the same way that one would leap away from a fire, and the doctors rushed towards him as well.  


____

“He’s succumbing again,” said one of them, directing his fellows. “Anaesthetic, and get him into the heat room. Quick.”  


____

One of the doctors produced a syringe from somewhere, and stabbed it abruptly into Mr Glenny’s neck, and in a matter of seconds, his eyes had fallen closed, although his face continued to twitch, and his body with it. Someone pressed a button on the side of the bed, and it began to move on wheels, the four doctors pushing it out into the corridor and away. Maria began to follow it, but the receptionist stopped her with an outstretched arm, pulling the door closed.  


____

“He’s in safe hands,” she said. “While they tend to him, then me and Dr Heigham will look after you. Dr Heigham was one of the people looking after your father before, Miss Glenny.”  


____

“I was leading the operation,” said the other doctor, the only one still remaining in the room, whose face was turned away as he scribbled rapidly on a chart. “By your father’s side the entire time. It’s perfectly alright, Miss Glenny, Miss Ives. The team in there will take good care of Us.”  


____

“What did you say?” said El, slowly.  


____

“I said that they’ll take good care of him,” said the doctor, who had stopped writing, but was still not looking at them. “They’re very experienced professionals, and the contagion can’t stay there forever.”  


____

“You didn’t say that, though,” said El, moving towards Maria, putting herself between Dr Heigham and her friend. “Look at us. Face us.”  


____

“I’m really quite busy here –“  


____

“Look at us, doctor,” said Maria, who was standing next to El now, resisting her attempts to act as a human shield. “Let us see your eyes.”  


____

He was still for a moment, and then shrugged, turning to them, and there was a cruel smile on his black-eyed face.  


____

“It is fine,” he said, tilting his head to one side as he did. “Patience is no longer required. We have you here now, Eleven. And we are going to make you join Us.”  


____

____

*******

____

____

Nikolay stood, perfectly still, on the ash-covered sidewalk, and prayed to all the gods he had never believed in that the Flower-Shark had not seen them.  


____

Kali was stock-still as well, he saw out of his peripheral vision, and had risen to her feet, the strange red light full of memories no longer seeming particularly important.  


____

“Can you hide us?” he whispered, only slightly louder than breathing. The Flower-Shark did not seem to be looking in their direction, but then, it was somewhat unclear exactly how they sensed things around them anyway, with no eyes or ears to be seen on their heads. Perhaps the telepathic connection between members of their species was fit for multiple purposes, and could be used to track down prey by listening for the sound of thoughts. This did not seem a tremendously reassuring hypothesis, so Nikolay tried to ignore it.  


____

“Doing so,” said Kali. “We should be invisible to it, if this is working.”  


____

“Can’t you tell?”  


____

“Well,” Kali whispered, “I can think of one way that we might find out. But you probably won’t enjoy it.”  


____

“What?” whispered Nikolay in return, as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, preparing to tiptoe back in the direction they had come.  


____

“If it kills and eats us,” said Kali, just as quietly and seriously, “then we’ll know it didn’t work.”  


____

Nikolay stared flatly at her.  


____

They took one step, and then another. The Flower-Shark was not moving.  


____

“Where are we going?” hissed Kali.  


____

Nikolay shook his head, feeling ash fall from his hair. “As far as feels safe. Back to the plane, if we can.”  


____

“And then what?”  


____

He shrugged. They took another step.  


____

“We need to go further into town,” she said. The silhouette of the Flower-Shark was fainter, now, with the fog and the darkness obscuring it more and more as they crept away from it. “It’s our only chance.”  


____

“It can’t be safe,” said Nikolay. “That’s where the other Flower-Sharks will be, I bet. And the darkness will be thicker, and the ash…” He trailed off, for a disturbing realisation was dawning on him.  


____

“What?”  


____

“Kali,” said Nikolay, “the ash. Have you remembered it?”  


____

“Of course I’ve remembered it,” said Kali, as irritably as a whisper would allow. “It’s in my fucking eyes, Palenko; I’m not going to forget about it any time soon.”  


____

“That’s not what I meant,” said Nikolay. “I mean, is it accounted for in your illusion?”  


____

Kali stopped walking, and stared up at him, mounting fear on her face, as she realised what he had done – that they could be as invisible as they wanted, but anyone looking in their direction was going to see a large hole in the swirling ash. “Shit.”  


____

And, as if it had been waiting for the best possible moment – perhaps it had, perhaps it had been toying with them this whole time – the Flower-Shark’s face opened with a bone-juddering shriek, and it sprang towards them, and they ran.  


____

It was no longer the time for stealth, or grace, or indeed any real level of rational thought. They sprinted, as fast as they could, aimlessly and desperately propelling themselves through the streets of Hawkins, trying desperately to stay far enough from the creature following them, despite the knowledge that it was in its home terrain here in the shadowed city.  


____

“Gun!” shouted Kali, and Nikolay – remembering that he was indeed armed – pulled Ozerov’s pistol from his belt, and turned to look over his shoulder as he kept running, and fired blindly in the direction of the Flower-Shark. He was not sure whether he had missed or whether the bullet had just bounced off the creature’s unfairly tough flesh – they had not fallen to bullets at Klyuchi, after all – but the end result was the same, for it kept following them.  


____

He fired again, with much the same effect, and then Kali was grabbing his arm, pulling him to the side, down into an alleyway sparkling with the red orbs. One of them drifted into his path as he sprinted down the alley, and for a split-second, a memory that was not his erupted across his mind – sitting in a dark basement with another person and reading a list of names in a newspaper, names of the dead – before it was gone again, and he shoved the thought from his mind in favour of firing another shot at the Flower-Shark.  


____

At the end of the alleyway, Kali darted left, and he followed. The Flower-Shark was very close now, pulling itself along the walls of the alley with inhumanly long arms, and he could see the individual teeth in its petal face.  


____

They ran across the road, and onto a patch of what might have been grass in the real world, covered with grey vines and slime here, and then there did not appear to be anywhere else to run, as the rusted parody of a chain-link fence towered above them. Kali slammed her body into it, in desperation, but it did not move.  


____

The Flower-Shark had slowed to a walk now, loping calmly across the vines towards them, and once again, it let out a shriek, flaring its horrific mouth at them. This one sounded like cruel triumph.  


____

And Nikolay, realising that he didn’t have much to lose by doing so, stepped forward to meet it, and pushed the hand holding the gun into the cave of its mouth, and pulled the trigger three times.  


____

Its petal-jaws swung shut, and Nikolay felt the teeth cutting into his right arm, but it was too late, for the bullets had already struck home. The Flower-Shark staggered slightly – Nikolay took the opportunity to pull his arm free of its mouth, dragging it against the angle of its barbed teeth and ignoring the pain – and then fell, sinking to its knees, desperately trying to swing its clawed arms at the two of them even as the life ebbed from its body. There was a liquid running out of its mouth, and Nikolay didn’t know whether it was his blood, or that of the Flower-Shark.  


____

He gasped in the air, in exhaustion and relief and pain, and sank down against the chain-link fence, letting it take his weight. He was bleeding, quite profusely, and that would surely be a problem soon – more Flower-Sharks would undoubtedly come in search of them – but for now, he could try and rest.  


____

“Nikolay,” said Kali, and he turned to look at her, to see that she was looking behind him, through the fence. Awkwardly, he swivelled his body to look.  


____

There was a woman standing there, on the other side of the fence, and her body was glowing with a dim white light.  


____

Her expression was calm and serene, framed by brown-blond hair, and she wore what appeared to be a hospital gown, long and flowing. She was looking at them, and as Nikolay watched, she walked silently towards them, and passed through the chain-link fence as though it was made of smoke, to stand in front of them.  


____

“What’s happening?” said Nikolay, and noticed with dispassionate interest that his voice sounded weaker than he had expected it to be.  


____

“Kali,” said the woman, her tone disbelieving and affectionate. “Kali Prasad. You’re here. I’m so sorry, Kali.”  


____

“I’ve never met you before in my life,” said Kali, but she was frowning, as if she was not entirely sure whether this was true or not.  


____

“You have,” said the woman, “but it was a very long time ago, and a lot has changed since then, for all of us. And back then, once upon a time, I went by the name of Terry Ives.”  


____

____

*******

____

____

Midday.  


____

At least, here it was midday, Josh thought to himself. The pale February sun was standing high above Winterton, yet somehow – through some mechanism he could neither explain nor understand, yet which still felt intrinsically true – it would not be shining on Hawkins, only a few hundred miles away. He’d heard the certainty in the voices of Will’s old friends, the fear, and it had revealed to him that, once again, he’d been underestimating the scale of the problems at hand.  


____

At first, it had seemed like a weird man – either a criminal or a government enforcer, if there was much of a practical difference – was chasing them, for reasons unknown. Then, in the woods, he’d wondered if this was some kind of cult, a conspiracy of many people trying to kidnap or kill them. And then Will and El had explained everything, and told him the stakes at hand – the other dimensions, the monsters, the thing that was trying to take over the world and had nearly managed twice before – and he’d seen the Vestige in action, seen it nearly win the previous night, and he’d thought that he understood. And now that was seeming somewhat less certain, because he had the distinctive sense that reality itself appeared to be unravelling.  


____

They would be fine, he insisted to himself. They just needed to wait for Mrs Byers to get back from the hospital with El and Maria and the punks, and then they could work out a plan as to how to stop the Vestige, before it encompassed the entire town.  


____

Over in the corner of the room, Jonathan and Will were quietly talking to one another. It seemed like a private conversation, so Josh had no wish to disturb them, and in any case, he had no idea quite what he would say to Will. He was still reeling from the revelation, in a way; as much as he’d idly daydreamed about the possibility that there was a chance of his feelings being reciprocated, he’d never exactly expected that Will would just outright confess that he was gay as well, and that maybe the impossible dream wasn’t necessarily so impossible after all.  


____

Should he tell Will that he was the same? Or would that seem too much like cowardice, like he had just been waiting for someone else to do the hard work of seeing whether everyone present would still want to be friends with them? Or, perhaps, would it seem too obvious that he was in love with Will (and yes, there was definitely no point in denying this any longer; somewhere in the past few days, since he had spoken to Maria about it, the notion had solidified and entrenched itself, and now had something close to the status of holy writ in his mind), which would present its own problem?  


____

Josh sighed. Feelings were difficult, even when the world wasn’t ending.  


____

____

One o’clock.  


____

Josh was bored. He’d assumed that the others would have been back by now, although he had never actually been to a hospital in America for fear of being discovered, so – he admitted to himself – he had absolutely no reliable idea of how long it would normally take.  


____

It was like the six months he had spent in Lebanon, waiting for death or escape, whichever came first. His father had been out working for the majority of the time, working dangerous construction jobs building the luxury hotels of Beirut, and that had not been a tremendously appropriate place for a nine-year-old, so he had generally stayed in the place that they had called home, sometimes watched over by an old Kurdish woman whom they had found after a few months in the refugee districts. And it had been terrifying, of course, it had never stopped being terrifying, but after a while, it had become boring as well. The feeling of sitting and waiting for a possible death was unpleasant on both fronts.  


____

Murray was pacing in small circles, and had been for around fifteen minutes now. It had not become any less aggravating, and Will had looked as though he had been about to say something at some point about this, but had not managed. Jonathan was sitting by the window, staring out into nothingness with clouded eyes; he had made a phone call maybe half an hour ago, telling someone that he probably wouldn’t be able to work the evening shift tonight (Josh had not even known that he had a job), and had winced slightly and repeatedly during the long silence that ensued, as though the person on the other end of the call had been stabbing him through the telephone line, and when he had finally hung up, he looked wearier than he had ever done before.  


____

Will, somehow, was drawing, sketching the view of the woods out of the kitchen window, and Josh was unsure whether to be frustrated or impressed at this.  


____

____

Two o’clock.  


____

They were still not back. Jonathan had tried to phone the hospital, but had been turned away by whatever switchboard existed between them and the building five miles down the road from them; they’d requested an identification code, and he didn’t have one, or know what his mother’s might have been.  


____

“Look,” said Murray, in a low voice, and the rest of them stood up, making their way over to the window where he was standing.  


____

“What are we looking for?” said Will.  


____

“Them,” said Murray, jerking his head by way of indication, and Josh noticed what he was looking at. There, across the road, among the trees, people were standing in a loose crowd, spread out from one another, and all staring at the house.  


____

“The Vestige?” said Jonathan.  


____

Will nodded. “I think so. I can…sort of feel them, a bit.”  


____

“I mean,” said Josh, “even if it’s a different large group of people surrounding the house, that still seems like a cause for concern nonetheless.”  


____

Murray nodded.  


____

“Can they see us?” said Will. “Should we be hiding?”  


____

“Makes no difference, probably,” said Jonathan. “They know we’re here. They’ve known for a while, I imagine.”  


____

“What are they doing?”  


____

“Waiting, I think.”  


____

They stood, watching the Vestige stare back at them. Josh tried to count them, but it was more difficult than it seemed, with the cover of the trees, and the near-indistinguishability of the figures in the dappled shadows.  


____

“Workers of the world, unite,” muttered Murray, something close to humour but not quite the same in his voice.  


____

“I still don’t get it,” said Josh. “Why are they all workers? Why does the Vestige care?”  


____

“Because they’re the easiest targets,” said Jonathan, his voice quiet and subdued. “They’re the people working long hours alone, out at night working on the roads or late in the evening in the docks. They’re the people without security systems at their houses that will warn the authorities if they’re taken.”  


____

“And they’re the ones who are exhausted, and desperate,” said Will. “That’s what he likes, and I don’t think the Vestige is much different, even if it doesn’t really know what it is without my memories. He likes the minds that are already beaten down and tired, because they don’t put up as much of a fight.”  


____

It looked as though Jonathan was about to add to that, but Murray interrupted, hissing, “Pay attention. They’re moving.”  


____

And they were. From out of the woods, the soldiers of the Vestige began to walk, quite calmly and in lockstep, assembling themselves on the road and pausing there.  


____

“If they go much further, onto the garden,” said Murray, “they’ll walk into the traps, hopefully. If they try and go down the driveway, we start shooting. Prepared?”  


____

Josh nodded, but he did not think that he was necessarily telling the truth.  


____

“Ready,” said Will, and his voice was utterly calm, focused, and Josh tried not to look at him, because he did not need any distractions now.  


____

From the crowd, a single member stepped forward, the others still staring at the house. It was one of the ones from the woods that night, Josh thought, but he had no idea who this person had once been. No idea, indeed, if that person was still there, inside.  


____

They stooped to the floor, and picked up a stone, and straightened up again. And then, not breaking eye contact with the four people standing inside the house, they threw the stone, harder and faster than a human arm should have been able to manage, and it soared through the air, and struck into the window with great force.  


____

Instinctively, Josh flinched back, and he was not alone, but the window did not break, with spider-web cracks forming across it from the point of impact. And then another stone, thrown by another of the Vestige’s soldiers, struck the same spot, and the cracks lengthened and widened.  


____

“What are they doing?” said Josh, but nobody answered. As one, they began to retreat slightly from beside the window.  


____

A third stone, and then a fourth. And then a fifth, and the window shattered with an almighty crash, glass raining down from it onto the carpet of the Byers’s living-room.  


____

“OK,” said Josh. “So now we’re cold. Well, that was a tactical masterstroke on their part –“  


____

And then he saw, with the rest of them, a new figure moving towards the front of the crowd on the road, wearing some kind of protective clothing, and it was holding something different in its hand, something flickering dimly, and Murray yelled, “Back, back, back!” and pushed the three of them away to the side, hurling himself after them, as the figure threw it.  


____

It flew, quite gracefully, through the air, through the shattered window, and as it landed with a crunch just next to the sofa, the alcohol in the broken glass bottle flew in all directions, and the firebomb ignited in a great rushing burst, and then there were flames, flames, everywhere, spreading –  


____

____

*******

____

____

Sam Owens lowered the phone into its cradle, and let out a sigh as he stared at the Washington skyline.  


____

Something was happening, down in Winterton, at the hospital. It was very unclear, from the scattered reports which had made their way out of that installation, exactly what the problem was – nobody was being entirely consistent with one another, which was understandable, since the first report had only arrived six minutes ago – but none of the possible options looked good.  


____

There was no word yet either from the man, Eddie Vincenzo, he had sent in to take a look at affairs in Hawkins. He was under no illusions that Vincenzo was in any sense _his_ agent – the man moved in the sorts of circles that included Murray Bauman and that strange agent in the basement of the FBI (and probably Nancy Wheeler one day soon enough, if his luck stayed the way it currently was), and had significantly less in the way of permanent principles than any of them – but he was supposed to be a professional, and he had requested regular reports every morning. It was concerning, and so were the anecdotal reports that had been coming from contacts in Hawkins over the last few weeks. And, if that wasn’t enough, one of Beeching’s allies in the President’s inner circle had called an urgent meeting for the afternoon, and he had no idea what this might be about.  


____

A knock on the door.  


____

“Come in,” said Owens, trying to keep his voice friendly and calm. It was his assistant, Ormesby, bearing a new file and an apologetic expression.  


____

“Wonderful,” he sighed. “Just add that to the pile, Harry, if you would. I guess that’s my lunch break cancelled again.”  


____

“Sorry, sir,” said Ormesby. “But there’s something else as well. Just come in.”  


____

“Oh?”  


____

“New message from Agent Walsham, down in Ansted. He still doesn’t know who this prisoner that Beeching was interrogating last night might have been – and all the people that observed the Gate being opened have been separated from the rest of the staff – but there’s something else as well.”  


____

Owens stared at his assistant, who was fidgeting slightly. “Come on, Harry, spit it out. Rip the band-aid off, if you’d be so kind.”  


____

Ormesby took a deep breath. “An unmarked plane landed at Ansted this morning, sir. We’ve tracked it back to Hong Kong, but Walsham saw who was in it anyway. It’s Brenner, sir. Beeching’s brought him back.” 

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over three thousand views - this is incredible! Thank you so much to everyone who's read this far - it is absolutely amazing knowing that there are this many people out there who are even slightly interesting in what I've got to say!
> 
> Same drill as ever - if you've got any thoughts on this chapter, whether positive, negative, ambivalent, confused, conspiratorial, theorising, or whatever, then I would absolutely love to hear them! Reading people's comments are always basically some of the high points of my week, because there's really no other feeling as a writer quite like listening to other people share their thoughts on something that you've produced - and it's always fun to see where people think the story might be heading! We're past the halfway mark in terms of chapters now, so consider this the beginning of the descent into the ending...
> 
> Next up, probably around the start of December (university coursework and PhD applications permitting) - Chapter 13: Here Comes The Rain Again...


	13. Here Comes The Rain Again

The hospital ward was bright and cold, and the Vestige stared hungrily across it at the two girls.  


Maria felt herself gasping in fear, and taking an instinctive step backwards towards the closed door, but El did not seem to be moving.  


“What do you want?” she said, her voice thin and defiant.  


“You,” said the Vestige, through the mouth of the doctor, whilst the receptionist – her eyes black and hollow as well – stood by, watching with a tilted head. “We remember you. And you remember Us.”  


“Not really,” said El. “The real you never possessed me.”  


“But you understand nonetheless,” said the receptionist. “And your mind has powers of its own, powers that we can unlock and use for our own purposes.”  


Maria was against the wall now, and prayed that the Vestige was too busy focusing on El to see what she was doing, what she was trying to surreptitiously pick up behind her back.  


El shook her head, and held up the scan of her brain. “No it doesn’t. Not any more.”  


“A pity,” said the doctor, considering, and then he smiled sharply. “Then we will just have to consume you, and your friend, and this whole hospital. And you will be unable to stop us.”  


“Yeah?” said Maria, hefting the fire extinguisher in front of her. “I’m not so sure about that.”  


She released the catch on the top, and fired the contents of the metal cylinder at the two of them, and – not entirely deliberately – she yelled as she did so in wordless fear and rage alike, for they were taking her father away from her again, and threatening her friend, and she was tired of this whole situation. And then, as the thick and cold foam engulfed the two possessed people, sending them staggering backwards, El seemed to come to her senses first, and turned, running to the door and wrenching it open, and she grabbed Maria and pulled her along too, and she dropped the empty fire extinguisher to the floor and gave up on trying to think ahead and just ran too.  


They tore down the corridors, and Maria silently cursed their uniformity, their polished blankness and anonymous wooden doors, because she had no idea whether they were heading in the right direction or not – but, then again, any direction away from that thing, the Vestige, seemed like the right one at this point. And then, somehow, they had made it to the elevator door, and the pair of them frantically jabbed their fingers against the call button, and nothing seemed to be happening.  


“Come on,” muttered Maria, under her breath, an automatic mantra, and then El turned to look over her shoulder, and stiffened in fear, and Maria turned as well to see Dr Heigham and the receptionist, their clothes dripping with foam, striding through the door and towards them. As she looked, another door opened, and someone else stepped out, dressed in a janitor’s outfit but bearing the same dark-eyed stare, and began to advance on them as well.  


“We need to run,” said El, and Maria silently agreed – there was no way that the lift would arrive in time – and they ran again, directionless and aimless, deeper and deeper into the great underground labyrinth of the hospital.  


*******

“Come on,” said Dustin, “I’m right, aren’t I? You’re one of the other spies here in Hawkins. It’s obvious.”  


David Waxham stared at him, and in the flickering red light cast by the wall of the chamber, Dustin realised quite suddenly that he might have misjudged the situation after however many years of knowing Hopper, assuming that the Chief of Police was at worst an obstacle rather than an outright threat. But there was a dead body on the floor, and Waxham had put it there – he had shot Vincenzo without hesitating, and had stepped over his corpse without even looking at it – and, Dustin realised, it was entirely possible that this was a situation which he would not be able to talk his way out of.  


“What are you kids doing here?” said Waxham, his tone low and dangerous. “Who sent you? Owens? Beeching?”  


“Nobody sent us,” said Steve, his voice worryingly controlled. “I swear, sir, we’re not working for anyone.”  


“Then why the fuck are you down here?”  


“We wanted to know about the ghosts,” said Dustin, deciding that trying to come up with a clever lie would be too much of a risk. “And about people losing their memories, and the weird dreams, and all of that stuff. We thought that we’d find the answers at the Lab. Honestly, that’s it.”  


“Ghosts?” said Waxham, confusion in his tone, and then he shook his head irritably, as though he were trying to get rid of a particularly persistent fly. “Never mind. You got here from the Lab?”  


Steve nodded. “There’s a tunnel between the two, sir, through the bedrock –“  


“I fucking know that,” snarled Waxham. “I was the one who put the rope there. I’ve been using that tunnel for weeks now. What did you find in the Lab?”  


“Only notes,” said Steve. “That’s it; just a load of incomprehensible notes on a table.”  


“Your notes, I presume?” said Dustin. It did not seem too much of a stretch.  


Waxham nodded. “My notes. My laboratory down here. You kids have no fucking idea what you’re messing with here.”  


“What is it?” said Steve, guileless curiosity in his voice.  


“None of your business, is what it is,” said Waxham. “You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have seen any of this.”  


“But I know what it is,” said Dustin. “I saw the notes. You found Brenner’s sick research, his torture diaries, and you wanted to go further. You wanted to build your own psychics.”  


Waxham’s eyes narrowed. “Smart kid. Impressive. You understand the equipment here as well, do you?”  


“Sort of,” said Dustin, wondering as he did exactly why Waxham was engaging with him on this matter. Pride, perhaps; he wanted to brag about his experimental setup which he’d been working on in secret for months, and Dustin understood that motivation. “Brenner worked out what compounds, which hormones, were produced if he altered the development of the medulla oblongata, the precise balance, and now you’re synthesising them yourself. You’ve got the isolation tank, and when it’s time, you’ll put someone inside and give them that cocktail of hormones and chemicals, and watch as they develop powers. And then I guess you’ll put a number on their arm, just to complete the whole thing.”  


“Kid,” said Waxham, his voice low, “you want to stop talking.”  


“Yeah, Dustin,” muttered Steve. “Come on. Can’t we just–“  


“Just what, Steve?” said Dustin, and he could feel himself growing more and more angry as he looked at the array of bubbling test tubes and glass cylinders and blue flames, and at the man who had set them up. “Just be polite, be civil? To the man who thinks that the only place Martin fucking Brenner went wrong was in dying before he could get all the way up to 999 with his tattoos?”  


“Shut up,” hissed Waxham. “Shut the hell up, kid.”  


“No,” said Dustin. “I’m Dustin Henderson, and I don’t shut up for anyone. Why are you doing this? What are you hoping to achieve?”  


“Progress!” shouted Waxham, something in his voice snapping, and the red light danced over his face. “Fuck you, kid. I’m doing the right thing here. Brenner was on the edge of the newest scientific revolution here, telepathy and telekinesis and everything else. If we harness this, we can build instant communication networks across the whole globe, revolutionise the construction industry, unlock the secrets of psychology and psychiatry, everything. The Sovereign Group know the potential of this technology, and that’s why they sent me here to this godforsaken town, to retrieve it, and I wouldn’t care if the inventor had been a raging neo-Nazi as long as he got these results. That’s what’s important, kid, results, and as long as you keep up this fucking moral outrage, then you’re not going to be getting any. Can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. It’s the only way.”  


“Yeah,” said Dustin, “but there’s a bit of a difference between breaking eggs and torturing children, you piece of shit.”  


“Wait a moment,” said Steve, who did not sound as angry as either of the others, and merely seemed confused, “did you say Sovereign? Like, the bank?”  


“What?” said Dustin, losing his train of thought.  


“Sovereign Banking,” said Steve. “There’s a branch of theirs in Hawkins. My mom worked as a secretary there, once. Are you telling us that that’s who you’re working for?”  


Waxham took a deep breath, and nodded. “Yeah. But the Sovereign Group is a lot bigger than just a bank –“  


“Oh, I see,” said Dustin, scarcely thinking about the consequences, about the danger. “I get it now. That’s what all of this is for. You want to grow your own psychics, use their telepathy, use their whole astral projection thing, so that you can make the right investments, work out which stocks are going to rise and fall, spy on everyone until you make a tidy profit out of it. Of course. Of fucking course.”  


“It’s more complicated than that –“  


“No,” said Dustin, suddenly feeling tired, angry and tired and powerless. “No, it isn’t. It’s really quite simple, isn’t it? You’ve found a new way to make lots of money, and you don’t care how many people had to suffer for you to get hold of this. You get it, don’t you, Steve?”  


“Yeah,” said Steve, quite quietly, and Dustin somehow knew without looking at him, just from the tone of his voice, that he was thinking about home, about his great empty house and his parents away on their business trips. “Yeah, I get it.”  


“So go on, then,” said Dustin, holding out his hands. “Arrest us. Take us to the police station, force us to sign non-disclosure forms, do whatever you’re going to do, Chief. Shit, it doesn’t even matter if we tell people about this, does it? Who’s going to arrest the people behind it? The cops?”  


“Oh, kid,” said Waxham, and his voice was very calm and steady, entirely sane. “I don’t think you do get it, after all. We can’t have you talking to Owens or Beeching about this whole thing, passing news back. The Sovereign Group simply can’t let that happen.”  


“So?” said Steve, but Dustin was feeling a cold sensation creep over him, as he realised what Waxham’s answer was going to be.  


“So,” said the Chief of Police, “I’m going to have to kill you both. It’s the only way.”  


*******

Smoke, fire, everywhere, was sweeping through the room and the corridors, and Will’s eyes were burning.  


“Josh! Jonathan!” he yelled, or tried to, but his mouth filled with smoke as he did so, and the cry for help tailed off into involuntary coughing. The carpet was on fire now, he could see, flames advancing slowly and implacably across it, and he began to instinctively scramble away from it, and found his back colliding sharply with a wall, and he stumbled, falling.  


The flames were hot against his face now, despite their distance, cold air from the smashed window fanning the flames and blowing them inwards, towards him, towards the rest of the house. He blinked, again and again, trying as hard as he could to clear his vision and see through the swirling smoke, but for the life of him, he could not make out the forms of any of the others. He was alone, alone in the trap the Vestige had made for him.  


And then a hand was on him, grabbing him under the arm, lifting him up, and Will began to struggle, before he heard Josh’s voice coughing out a muffled “It’s me, it’s me!”, and he relented, steadying himself on his feet, and following where the other boy was leading, away from the flames. Will rubbed his eyes frantically with his hand, stumbling after Josh, and glanced back; they were in the kitchen now, where there was less smoke, and Josh pushed the window open with one hand, the other one still resting against Will. Behind them, the entire living room was now ablaze, the flames consuming the sofa and the armchairs, licking the walls with orange tongues, peeling the paint and shredding the wallpaper.  


“Let me go first,” said Josh, his voice hoarse and raspy. “They might be waiting. We can’t let them get you.”  


“I’m not letting them get you either,” said Will, coughing, staring behind him for any sign of Jonathan or Murray. Wherever they were, it could not be in the living room, surely –  


“Oh, for god’s sake,” muttered Josh, a hint of his normal sarcasm making its way into his tone, and he climbed onto the countertop, and gracelessly hurled himself through the window, collapsing onto the floor on the other side. Will was about to shout to see whether the other boy was alright, but stopped himself, for if the soldiers of the Vestige were lying in wait for them, then secrecy and stealth would be crucial, as much as was possible, so he merely bit down hard on his lip, and climbed through the window as well, dropping down onto the pine-needled floor beneath and landing next to where Josh was crouching.  


“Where are the others?” he said.  


Josh shook his head. “No idea. Lost them. I was looking for you, and I lost track of them after the explosion –“  


“We need to find them,” said Will.  


“No,” said Josh, shaking his head urgently. “We need to get out. Quick. Before the Vestige finds us.”  


“We can’t leave them behind –“  


“Don’t you get it? This is a trap. They’re here for you, trying to get your memories. The longer we stay here, the more time it gives them to close in on us. Only reason they haven’t got you yet is because they’re scared of the fire, I reckon. We need to escape now, and just pray that the others managed as well. They must have done. They’re smart people.”  


Will stared at the other boy, involuntary tears running from his smoke-reddened eyes, calm desperation in his expression, and nodded, trying to ignore the feeling that he was leaving the others to die in the inferno. “Yeah. You’re right. Time to run.”  


“Time to run,” said Josh, nodding, and he reached out his hand, and grasped Will’s, and they ran, into the pinewoods, away from the road, away from the burning house that Will had lived in for five months, away, away, away.  


*******

The wind had stopped.  


It was not real, Robin reflected. Of course it was not real, none of this place was. But still, there was something deeply, viscerally unsettling about seeing the waves on the lake freeze into place, and the displaced leaves come to a dead stop in the air where they had been blowing. Everything had stopped, apart from her, and the girl standing next to her that had once been Heather Holloway.  


They were walking, the pair of them, along the beach by the side of the motionless lake, and had been for some time now, probably. She wasn’t sure, if she was being entirely honest with herself, quite how long they had been walking for; time seemed to work in a different way here.  


“ _Here_ ,” said the voices that issued from Heather’s mouth quite suddenly, as the girl came to a stop. “ _This is where to look._ ”  


“What am I looking for?” said Robin, confused.  


“ _Not yet_ ,” said the voices. “ _But you will. Here._ ”  


Robin looked around, trying to work out what was so different about this particular stretch of beach, here on one of the less fashionable inlets of Lovers’ Lake. They were almost on the edge of the treeline here, with a large stand of silver birch sprawling behind them, and rocks littered the beach, grey and featureless. One of them, she saw as she looked closer, wasn’t a rock at all, but a piece of concrete, mostly submerged by the lakewater.  


“Look,” said Robin, turning back to face Heather, whose expression had not changed in the slightest. “What are you doing here? Why am I here?”  


“ _Because we have not been forgotten yet_ ,” said Heather again. “ _We will be here until nothing remains of us._ ”  


“OK, cool,” said Robin. “But why? You said that the world was weaker here, and that’s why you’re…haunting the town, or whatever the hell you’re actually hoping to achieve in Hawkins –“  


“ _It is not our choice_ ,” said the voices. “ _We have been brought forth by other forces. We cannot help but act according to our nature._ ”  


“And what might this nature be?” asked Robin. “Because, you know, here’s the thing. I think that’s an excuse that’s had a lot of airing recently. I think it’s kind of bullshit.”  


“ _No_ ,” said Heather. “ _It is true. We do not think as you do. We are not minds, that may choose to act or not to act as they see fit. We have no agency._ ”  


“Then what are you, if you’re not minds?”  


“ _Memories_ ,” said the voices. “ _All of us. All of the dead of Hawkins._ ”  


Robin said nothing, and turned away, looking back out over the lake, and she sank down to sit on one of the rocks. In her peripheral vision, she could vaguely see Heather drifting back to her side, and noticed that the girl’s legs did not appear to be moving as she did.  


“Yeah,” said Robin, eventually. “It makes sense.”  


Heather cocked her head inquisitively, and Robin smiled bitterly to herself, because that was what the other girl had always done back when they had been friends. Indeed, she thought, that was probably the only reason that Heather was doing it now; because she remembered it.  


“Memories,” said Robin. She picked up a pebble from the beach, threw it into the lake, watched it plunge into the motionless water without leaving a single ripple. “They can’t act. They can’t talk any more, not of their own volition. But people can talk for them, the still-living, and they do, all the time. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted this.’ ‘He wouldn’t have agreed.’ That sort of thing. And they keep doing it – everyone does – over and over again, and somewhere along the line, the memories slip away from being about any one person, and gain a life of their own, and they get a new name. People start to call them traditions, instead, and then there’s no going back.”  


She threw another stone, trying to skim it, but it plunged into the depths without bouncing just like the first one had.  


“And when we think of the dead,” Robin continued, “or when we think about those traditions, we’re just thinking about ourselves, really. Memories are mirrors. We look into them searching for answers about the world, and all we see are distorted pictures of our own faces, our own hearts. Once the person’s gone, then all we can do is attribute our own thoughts and beliefs to them. There’s no more creativity, no more originality. It’s just us.”  


“ _Yes_ ,” said the voices.  


“And that’s what’s happening here as well, I suppose,” said Robin. “In Hawkins, that is. I don’t know where ‘here’ really is right now. I don’t suppose it matters all that much, or has a good answer to it. People are remembering the dead, always, everywhere – because there’s not a street in the whole of Hawkins that doesn’t have a gravestone associated with it, not a person who doesn’t know someone who died in Starcourt or in the Lab or wherever – and that’s where the ghosts come from. Unfinished business. Guilt, regret, unrequited love and dead friendship. Memories.”  


She threw a third stone, and did not watch to see whether it skimmed or not, standing up instead and turning to face Heather.  


“I understand,” she said. “Why you. Why the house, the leap of faith. Why here. It’s my memories, I know, and it’s the ones that won’t leave me. The regrets that are always going to be here.”  


“ _Yes_ ,” said Heather again. “ _All we are is a signal, a simple signal from the other side of the Between. Remember, repeat, remember. Please, please, remember._ ”  


“We can’t stop,” said Robin. “We never stopped, even before this. Hawkins won’t forget. It can’t forget. Forty-eight people in July, a hundred or so in 1984, maybe ten more in 1983. And then there’s the other ones, the mundane deaths. The car accidents, the heart attacks. This town has always been full of ghosts. This town will never let us go.”  


Heather nodded, and although her eyes were still utterly inhuman, terrifyingly white-black in their emptiness, there was maybe the barest hint of sadness in them.  


“So,” said Robin, “here it is, then. For what it’s worth. Heather, I’m sorry.”  


The girl cocked her head again, a question.  


“I’m sorry for how things happened,” Robin continued. “You weren’t a great friend after I told you the Secret, and then I never tried to do anything about it, because I was scared, and because I was lonely, and because I didn’t want to get hurt again by the only real friend I’d ever had. And we drifted away from one another, and then you died. Maybe you wouldn’t have, if we’d still been friends. Maybe you would. No way of knowing. There’s a whole garden of forking paths there, all of the alternate possibilities that could have happened if one or both of us had done things differently. But, for my part, I’m sorry that this was the path that we took.”  


The beach was very quiet and still, and then, eventually, Heather nodded, and the voices said, “ _Thank you, Robin._ ”  


“You’re welcome,” said Robin, smiling a rueful smile. “And I don’t want you to apologise to me either, because I know you can’t. I know it’d just be me talking through you. Just the memories, and what I want them to say.”  


Heather nodded, but her expression was different now, changed. Robin opened her mouth to begin speaking, then thought better of it and closed it, and then overruled her earlier veto, and opened it again.  


“Can I get back home?” she said.  


“ _Yes_ ,” said the voices.  


“How?”  


“ _By waiting for the way to be opened._ ”  


“And when’s that going to happen?”  


“ _Soon,_ ” the voices promised. “ _Soon she will open the way for you, for the other lost ones, and you will be taken back to Hawkins._ ”  


“Who’s ‘she’?” asked Robin. “And how much time has passed, down there?”  


“ _As much as you want,_ ” said the voices. “ _This is the Between. Time passes in a different way. The past and the future are all one here, beyond your universe. You can choose when to return to._ ”  


Robin was silent for a moment, thinking, and then said, “So I can go back and undo this? Make things go differently between us – I mean, between me and Heather – and fix everything?”  


The figure of Heather said nothing.  


“Or save everyone in the town, these last few years,” Robin continued, now mostly just to herself. “Stop Will’s monster before it got him, back in 1983. Save El from the Lab. Stop the Upside-Down being opened.”  


“ _Yes_ ,” said the voices. “ _You could._ ”  


“And then the Russians would open it,” said Robin. “The following year, or the year after. Open their own Gate, fight their own monsters. Forty-eight Russians dead in whatever they have instead of malls, instead of forty-eight Americans; a hundred dead Russians in some secret _laboratoriya_ in Siberia. Maybe they wouldn’t have anyone to close the Gate, like we did. Maybe the Mind Player would win.”  


She looked out back over the lake again.  


“And it wouldn’t really be fixing things, would it?” she said. “Between us? Because they happened. They happened, somewhere, and that’s the important thing.”  


The still waves were oddly hypnotic, she thought, peaceful, calming. She could have stayed here. She would have liked it.  


“No,” she said, decisively, turning back to Heather. “The past has happened. We’ve just got to move forward from there. Let the memories leave us, if they can.”  


“ _So,_ ” said the voices, “ _when?_ ”  


Robin thought about it for a moment, and wondered what Steve would say, or Dustin, or Nancy. They were the ones who were used to this sort of stuff. They’d practiced before.  


“Whenever they need me,” she said. “I want to be there to help.”  


*******

Mike slammed the phone down, and spun to face the window, desperately hoping that Neil Hargrove would somehow have vanished, that the problem had disappeared, but he was not that lucky.  


The man was standing at the full-length window, his face in shadow, standing with the calmness and military poise of a soldier; and then, without much warning, he threw his weight against the frame again, and it began to splinter. Lucas and Max were already standing, hand in hand, and were slowly backing away from the window; Mr Clarke was rising to his feet as well, bemusement and outrage written in equal measure across his face.  


“Lucas,” said Mike, his voice strangely calm – perhaps it was the painkillers – as he stood too, “is there another way out?”  


“Front door,” said Lucas, his voice somewhat less calm, “but he’ll see us. And the creature’s out there as well, Mike, it’ll get us if he doesn’t.”  


Mike nodded, calculating. “Any weapons?”  


“Garage,” said Lucas. “But I think it’s locked. I’d have to ask Dad for the keys – oh, god, Dad’s upstairs, asleep, and Mom, and Erica –“  


“They’ll be alright, Lucas,” said Mr Clarke, turning to face him for a moment, and there was so much conviction in the man’s eyes that Mike almost half-believed him, before he remembered that this was the conviction of a man who had not really seen what Hawkins was like underneath, when the layers were peeled away from the town. As if in agreement, Neil slammed into the windowframe again, with a disturbing crunching sound from the wood and the plasterboard around it.  


“No,” said Max, her voice almost a whisper. “He won’t stop. Unless he gets me.”  


“What are you talking about?” said Mike.  


“He’s here for me,” said Max. “I know it. He was going to hurt me, earlier, over dinner, and something stopped him, and I knew that it was only a delay. I knew it.”  


“He tried to hurt you?” said Lucas, and Mike could hear the fury bubbling in his friend’s voice. “And you didn’t tell me? Well, he’ll have to come through me first –“  


“Don’t you see?” said Max. “That’s what he wants, Lucas. He’s been wanting to get you since the day he found out about you, wanting an excuse. For god’s sake, don’t give it to him –“  


And then there was another crash from the window, and the frame was torn away from the plasterboard walls, and Neil Hargrove stepped unflinchingly through the hole that he had made, into the Sinclairs’ living room.  


“Maxine,” he said, and his voice was level, controlled, and somehow this was more unsettling than if he had been shouting, “come with me. I am expecting a lot of explanations from you.”  


“No,” said Max, softly, clutching onto Lucas’s hand, and then louder. “No. Fuck off, Neil.”  


Neil’s expression did not change, except for possibly something deep in the eyes, as he swung his left arm quite calmly, knocking everything from the top of the dresser beside the door onto the ground. Something smashed, sounding like glass.  


“That was not an invitation, Maxine,” he said. “That was an order. And if you do not accept it, then there will be consequences.”  


“Now, hold on,” said Mr Clarke, stepping forward, placing himself between Neil and the three of them. “Mr Hargrove, isn’t it? Let’s all just calm down a bit, and talk about this – we don’t need things to be any more fraught than they already are here.”  


Neil blinked, and regarded Mr Clarke with something close to contempt. Mike took the opportunity to move closer to Lucas and Max, standing beside them in solidarity.  


“Who the hell do you think you are?” he said.  


“My name’s Scott Clarke,” explained Mr Clarke, his voice steady. “I work at the school, with your stepdaughter and her friends. The three of them were involved in an accident earlier this evening, and I was in the area, so I offered to take care of them.”  


“Well, good job, professor,” said Neil. “But I’ll take Maxine now.”  


“I really think she’d rather stay with her friends, actually, Mr Hargrove,” said Mr Clarke. “I promise that she’s safe here.”  


“No,” said Neil, “I don’t think you get it, do you? I’m taking her with me. Back home.”  


“I’m not going to let you do that, I’m afraid,” said Mr Clarke, calmly.  


Neil stared at Mr Clarke, as if seeing him for the first time. “You didn’t fight in Vietnam, did you, Clarke?”  


“I didn’t, no,” said Mr Clarke, confusion lacing his words. “I was actually studying at the time, at college. Physics and Education. I’d always wanted to be a teacher, you see –“  


“Yeah,” said Neil, “I thought not. You wouldn’t have made it back alive if you did.”  


“Oh?” said Mr Clarke. “Why do you think that?”  


“Because you’re weak,” said Neil. “You don’t have the stomach for war. I can see it in your eyes, the fear. And because you don’t understand an order when it’s being given.”  


“I understood you perfectly,” said Mr Clarke, quietly. “But I don’t believe that you have any authority over me, sir. Or over the children behind me.”  


“Well,” said Neil, “I guess that fancy education of yours wasn’t all that useful, then.”  


Mr Clarke opened his mouth, and began to speak, and Neil punched him squarely in the jaw. He staggered back, and Mike wanted to say something, to do something, to try and help, but he found himself frozen to the floor in fear and indecision, and Lucas and Max seemed to be in exactly the same situation.  


Mr Clarke straightened up, and as he did, Neil punched him again, hard, in the face and then again in the jaw, and the teacher crumpled, and fell onto the hard wooden floor. Neil glanced down at him, dismissively, and stepped over him, and now there was nothing between him and the three of them.  


“I’ll say it again,” he said, his voice still just as level, although there was a horrible glint in his eyes, something broken. “Since I might not have made myself clear enough the first time. Maxine, you will step away from that negro boy and come with me. You will tell me exactly what you did to me at dinner earlier today, what you did to my memory. And then we shall decide on the consequences for your misdemeanours, your unruliness and misbehaviour, your disobedience. Together.”  


*******

An alarm, quite calmly, began to sound.  


In that first second of sound, Joyce knew, somehow. This was no normal fire drill, nothing standard; they were in trouble, real trouble. Of course.  


“What’s happening?” she demanded, leaning across the table towards Vaudrais. The doctor had been talking her through the nature of her daughter’s mind, and of the traumas that it had suffered – and had not even been trying to disguise her fascination with the subject, despite the fact that she was describing targeted brain damage applied to a child – but had trailed off with the sound of the klaxon.  


Vaudrais blinked twice, and looked at her. “It’s probably nothing, Ms Byers. Let me check. I’ll be back with you in a minute.”  


“The hell you will,” said Joyce, standing as Vaudrais did. “I’m coming with you.”  


Vaudrais looked as though she were about to protest, and then shrugged, and strode out of her office into the reception area, and another subconscious part of Joyce realised that if the other woman was not trying to stop her from checking the base’s security system as well, then the situation could not be good. And then she saw the emptiness of the reception, and another, far more alarming, thought hit her.  


“El? Maria?” she called, but there was no reply. Vaudrais barely broke her stride, but the man who inexplicably called himself Funshine emerged from a side door, and shook his head at her.  


“They’re not here,” he said, his soft voice serious. “The receptionist took them down to see Miss Glenny’s father, to check on his progress.”  


“Fuck,” whispered Joyce, because now there was something else to worry about, but Vaudrais was holding the door behind the reception desk open for her, and she followed, Funshine and Axel close behind her.  


The room on the other side was filled with screens and monitors, each showing flickering black-and-white images of various parts of the hospital; desks lined the walls, and there were several people frantically conversing in the centre, pointing at one particular bank of screens.  


“Gentlemen,” said Vaudrais, calmly, “status report?”  


They turned, and there was fear in their eyes.  


“It’s the contagion in Glenny, Doctor,” said one of them. “It’s reactivated – the girl took a flash photograph, and it was back. They’re operating on him now, but…”  


“But what?”  


The men looked nervously between one another, and one of them finally spoke up. “It’s spreading. Dr Heigham seems to have succumbed, and Sylvia from reception as well. Possibly a janitor or two. We don’t know if any of the other doctors have been infected.”  


“Shit,” said Vaudrais, in the clinical tones of someone who was not used to swearing. “If Heigham’s infected, any of the operating team might be. Lock down the whole floor.”  


“Wait, hold on,” said Joyce, “that’s where El and Maria are –“  


And then she saw the two of them, running glitchily and urgently across one of the screens, and gasped in shock, for there were other figures on that same screen, not too far behind them, walking calmly and purposefully.  


“You can’t lock the floor down,” she said. “You’ll lock them in there with that – thing –“  


Vaudrais considered for a moment, and then nodded sharply. “Cancel that order. Send Alpha Team down there to deal with Heigham and the others.”  


“We tried, Doctor,” said one of the men. “They’re not answering.”  


“They might have been eaten as well,” muttered Axel. “If this thing was waiting –“  


“What do you mean?” said Joyce.  


“I have to agree with Axel,” said Funshine. “The receptionist was the one who took the girls down to Glenny’s room. She was luring them into a trap.”  


Vaudrais visibly froze, and then slumped, letting out a hiss of air through her teeth. “Of course. Of course she was vulnerable. But why Heigham?”  


“We think he must have been exposed in a different way, Doctor,” said one of the other men. “Direct contact during the operation, most likely –“  


“Hang on,” said Joyce again, feeling like she was several steps behind everyone else, “you know whether people are vulnerable?”  


Vaudrais nodded slightly. “Yes. But that’s not the main issue now. We need to get those girls to safety. Can we close any of the firebreaks?”  


“When they’re into the next corridor,” said one of the men. “There’s one there. We’ll need to time it carefully, though, and it’ll block off their route to the stairs –“  


“Do it,” said Joyce, as forcefully as she could manage, and to her astonishment, the man saluted, and began entering commands into a keyboard. And then, on the screen that El and Maria had made it onto, a large metal door slid quickly down from the ceiling to the floor, less than a foot behind the two of them, cutting them off from their pursuers, and Joyce saw them spin in alarm and then sink to the floor in relief, hugging one another.  


“Safe for now,” said Vaudrais. “But there’s more. Lingwood, have you contacted all of the strike teams?”  


A man, presumably Lingwood, nodded. “None of them are answering. Either it’s blocking our signals somehow, or…”  


“Don’t rely on soldiers,” said Axel, his face twisting into a joyless smile. “They kill people for money, after all.”  


“It won’t have bribed them,” said Vaudrais, anger in her voice. “These men are loyal to the United States of America, and to Operation Rembrandt in particular. They can’t be bought off.”  


“But are they susceptible?” said Joyce, staring Vaudrais in the eyes.  


Vaudrais was the first to look away. “Possibly. We screen them regularly for signs of infection, but –“  


“Not regularly enough,” said Funshine.  


“Enough of this bullshit,” said Joyce. “What makes people susceptible?”  


Vaudrais paused for a moment. “We don’t understand why, but the contagion appears to affect working-class individuals with far greater frequency than any other demographic group, according to our records. It doesn’t explain Heigham, but direct exposure to Glenny, perhaps, or the stress of the job might have been similar enough –”  


Joyce blinked, and processed this, and then realised. “Wait. You knew about it? Owens knew about it? This whole time?”  


Vaudrais nodded, somewhat reluctantly. “We’ve been studying it since January.”  


“And you did nothing about it? Just let it infect half the town, whilst you stood by and watched?”  


“We were waiting for the right moment, Ms Byers,” said Vaudrais, helpless frustration in her voice. “It was a matter of strategy, of acceptable collateral damage, of caution. We needed to wipe it out all at once, otherwise it would escape, get out of our control –“  


“Fuck you,” said Joyce. “Fuck Owens and his caution. It’s already out of your control.”  


Vaudrais said nothing, merely staring blankly at the screens, and Joyce shook her head, and walked past her, towards the other men.  


“How many infected?” she said.  


“We’re not sure,” said Lingwood, apologetically. “We’ve got tabs on Sylvia, and one of the janitors, but Heigham’s found some kind of blind spot, I think. We don’t know where he’s going. And some of the cameras have started to go down, on the north side of that floor.”  


“They know we’re onto them,” said Joyce.  


“They can probably hear the alarms,” said Funshine. “And the firebreak may have given the game away somewhat.”  


“Fine,” said Joyce, taking a deep breath. “Fine. We’ll have to go down there ourselves.”  


“Are you utterly insane?” asked Vaudrais, from the other side of the room. “They’ll tear you to shreds down there. And god only knows how many people they’ll have lying in wait on the stairs for you –“  


“Well, we’re not just fucking sitting around here waiting,” said Joyce, venom in her tone, and Vaudrais shrunk back slightly. “You. Lingwood. Are there any security measures here? Traps, or something?”  


Lingwood nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Guns, fire, the works. Shall I try deploying that, ma’am?”  


Joyce considered it for a moment, and wondered whether there was anything left of the receptionist or the doctor or the janitors, and then bit her lip, and said, “Yes. Do it.”  


Lingwood, and one of the other men, began to type again, and Joyce stared at the screens, at the flickering images, feeling tired and frantic all at once. El and Maria were on the move again, walking on tiptoes along one of the anonymous corridors, peering through the keyholes of doors. Elsewhere, the doctors operating on Timothy Glenny were still hard at work on the man’s unconscious, struggling form; and then that camera blinked out as well, and the operating theatre was lost to her sight. And on another one, a janitor and a man in some other uniform, walking side by side in an eerie lockstep, and then a door swung open before them, and Heigham stepped out, and she could see an unmoving body behind him.  


“They’re not trying to convert,” said Funshine. “Not everyone. They’re killing people.”  


“Quicker,” said Axel. “Easier. Makes sense.”  


“Like playing Go,” said Funshine in agreement. “Consolidating their territory.”  


Lingwood hit a final key, and leaned back in satisfaction, which turned first to impatience and then to fear. “It’s not working. It’s not happening.”  


“What is it?” said Vaudrais, striding over and staring over his shoulder.  


“The traps,” said Lingwood. “They’re down. Oh, god, they’re down.”  


“So we isolate the floor,” said Vaudrais. “Until we can get reinforcements, to rescue the children and purge the contagion. We can cope with this.”  


“No,” said Lingwood, shaking his head. “Doctor, you don’t understand. The traps are centrally controlled, from a system on the floor above them. There’s a backup on the floor below them. And they’ve neutralised them both, taken them down, and the cameras there as well. They’re spreading. They’re climbing through the hospital, taking down our systems, killing our doctors and operatives, or infecting them with the contagion. They’re coming to get us.”  


*******

The dead girl stood in the corner of the room, quite silently and calmly.  


Nancy closed her eyes for a second, and then opened them, and turned, and looked into the face of her friend. Barb had not changed, not at all, not since the night of the party, all those years ago. Or, rather, she had stayed the same in all the unimportant ways – the face, the clothes, the posture – and had changed only in the way that Nancy had not wanted, from a living girl into a dead one.  


“Hello, Barb,” Nancy repeated, trying to keep her voice steady.  


“ _Nancy,_ ” said Barb, quietly, like the voice was coming from the other end of a long tunnel. “ _No. You can’t. This isn’t you._ ”  


Nancy tried to ignore the words, because she had heard them many times before, every night for the past few weeks, and she just about managed.  


“I’ve worked it all out, now,” she said instead. “I think. I went to Heather Holloway’s house, and saw her there. And I think I’ve put the pieces together.”  


“ _This isn’t you,_ ” said Barb.  


“I know why you’re saying that now, as well,” said Nancy. “Those words. Always the same ones. Do you want to know why?”  


“ _Nancy_ ,” said Barb.  


“It’s because they’re the ones that I remember,” said Nancy. “The last ones. Some of the last words I ever…I ever heard you say. When you were alive. And so those are the only lines that you’re allowed to say nowadays.”  


“ _No. You can’t._ ”  


“Because that’s what you’re made of, Barb,” said Nancy, her voice controlled and calm. “You’re made of my memories. Only that. You’re not really real. You’re not really there.”  


“ _Nancy,_ ” said Barb.  


“I should have known from the start,” Nancy continued. “I should have guessed that it wouldn’t really be you. Things don’t work that way. The dead aren’t really coming back. Not unless we dig them up ourselves.”  


“ _No. You can’t._ ”  


“Do you want to know something, Barb?” said Nancy, sinking down to sit on her bed, for she felt tired, so very tired. “I actually convinced myself, at first. The first time I saw you, however many weeks ago. I convinced myself that there might be something remaining of you. I tried to do some research, to try and work it out – alone, obviously, since secrecy is just what I do now, by habit more than anything, even with Jonathan sometimes – and I spent a few days convinced that I might be able to do it. That I might be able to bring you back.”  


“ _This isn’t you._ ”  


“But then, I guess, it dawned on me,” Nancy continued. “Of course you weren’t still alive. Things don’t work like that. We don’t get miracles, our side. If something impossible happens, then we’re going to have to suffer the consequences of it, not benefit from it.”  


“ _Nancy._ ”  


“So, I started to explain it in a different way,” said Nancy. She had not allowed herself to look away from Barb. That would make it too easy, and this was not supposed to be easy. “I told myself, I convinced myself, that when I saw you at night, when I heard you saying those words in a quiet voice in the darkness, that it was grief. Or guilt. They’re basically the same thing, when it comes to you. And that was a convincing explanation, a very convincing one indeed, because – you know why? Because this wasn’t the first time, by far.”  


“ _This isn’t you._ ”  


“You and the other ghosts,” said Nancy, feeling a catch in her throat and determinedly refusing to acknowledge it, “you appeared in January, or thereabouts. That’s what everyone in town says, and it all makes sense, it all adds up. When I finally started to investigate, when the complacency wore off and I actually started working again, it all became very clear that this wasn’t just something confined to me and me alone. But I’ve been seeing your ghost for so many years now, Barb, ever since 1983, ever since you died. I go to school, and I see you standing by the lockers. I go into town, and you’re waiting patiently on the sidewalk. You’re by the side of Steve’s pool, you’re in the diners and restaurants, you’re everywhere in Hawkins. You have been since 1983, for me, and not because of whatever’s happening now.”  


She waved her hand contemptuously at the figure in front of her. “It wasn’t _you_ that I’d been seeing since 1983. It was Barbara Holland. My best friend.”  


“ _No. You can’t._ ”  


“You’re not Barb,” said Nancy, her voice low and confident. “I don’t know what the hell you are. You’re something made of my memories, my most private and precious ones. I don’t know why, I don’t entirely know how, but I know that it can’t be anything good, because those aren’t the rules of the game. Whatever you are, whatever those things in the Holloway house or in Benny’s old diner or anywhere else might be, you’re the enemies. And you’re wearing her face, and I don’t know if you thought that I’d accept that, be grateful for it, but if you did, then you’re wrong. It just makes me more determined to put a stop to this. For the sake of Barb’s memory.”  


Nancy stood up, and cast the motionless figure one last glance, and then crouched down, and reached under her bed, and pulled out the large rectangular package stowed down there, wrapped in a couple of bedsheets, and she lifted it onto the bed.  


“ _Nancy,_ ” said the thing that looked like Barb, and Nancy wasn’t entirely sure whether it was just her imagination, or whether the tone of that voice had changed slightly, a note of confusion entering into it.  


“Like I told you,” said Nancy, unwrapping the sheets from the package, “I don’t understand a lot of this. I’m far more suited to the political side of things. That stuff makes sense. This is just downright weird. But I’ve been working, Barb, I’ve been working away at the problem, and I think I understand enough to put a stop to this.”  


“ _No. You can’t,_ ” said the figure.  


“We’ll see about that,” said Nancy. “It’s about the signal, isn’t it? That radio signal? I picked it up a few weeks back, when I was trying to call Jonathan, in the hope that we could have an unguarded conversation for once. Of course, when I picked up the signal, I ended up focusing on that instead. But hey, hopefully it’s worth it here.”  


“ _Nancy_.”  


“I have no idea how, or why, or really what this means,” she continued. “But I think the signal’s somehow producing you, making you appear, projecting you into my room and everywhere else besides. And I’ve got a way of testing that.”  


She threw aside the final sheet, and picked up one of the several thin pieces of plywood from the stack, quite carefully. It would not work, after all, if she damaged the aluminium foil that covered it.  


“If you were actually Barb,” said Nancy, smiling slightly, “then you’d probably be very impressed with this. I actually got some science books out of the library and everything, did some real research. Specifically, on radio waves.”  


“ _This isn’t you._ ”  


“Oh, hush,” said Nancy. “It was all for a good cause. Here’s what I found out. Apparently, you can block radio waves with material that conducts electricity well enough – don’t ask me why, I didn’t read that far ahead – and, particularly, with metals like copper or aluminum. So, let’s see whether the experiment works.”  


Slowly, deliberately, she walked over to the corner where Barb was standing, and placed the foil-covered plywood down onto the carpet. It passed through the body of Barb as she positioned it, and then the girl was standing in the air above it, just slightly.  


“I assume that you can tell which way this is going by now,” said Nancy, as she picked up another piece of wood. This one was slightly more complicated, with ridges and bevels along each side, and she slotted it quite calmly into the first piece, standing it up at a right angle behind Barb’s back. “Which makes it quite interesting that you haven’t tried to stop me. I rather suspect, in fact, that you can’t. All you can do is stand there.”  


“ _Nancy._ ”  


“Fine, stand there and say the same three phrases. Why’s that the case? Heather was able to do weird things with the house, twist it around us, make us climb endless staircases and stuff like that. And you’re not even lifting a hand to defend yourself, even when I’m trying to get rid of you.”  


“ _No. You can’t._ ”  


“Can’t I?” said Nancy. “I suppose we’ll see. But if this does work, if this does make you leave, then that’ll be another interesting data point to bear in mind. Perhaps all of you ghosts are different. Or perhaps you don’t mind if we shut you down.”  


She fastened a third piece of foil-wrapped wood into place, this one on Barb’s left-hand side.  


“ _This isn’t you,_ ” said Barb.  


“I know!” Nancy shouted, then remembered that Holly and her mother were asleep in the house somewhere, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I know that, Barb! Do you think I haven’t been thinking about that, every day for the last several months? Since Starcourt? I know that this isn’t me, not really. Nancy Wheeler isn’t supposed to be fighting a one-woman crusade against the government from her bedroom, or building experimental ghost-killing devices in the middle of the night when nobody will see her. She’s supposed to be studying for her finals, looking at colleges, being a teenager.”  


With rather more force than was necessary, she placed the fourth piece of wood into place. There were walls on both sides of Barb now, and behind her, and two more pieces left to add.  


“Nancy Wheeler isn’t supposed to be crying in the night,” she continued, softer now. “Or if she is, it’s supposed to be about boys and stuff, not about government-sponsored child experimentation. Nancy Wheeler isn’t supposed to be stopping herself from crying, wiping the tears away angrily, and telling herself that there’s work to be done instead, and doing that. When she talks to her boyfriend – which she should be doing a hell of a lot more often than she’s currently managing – she should be talking to him about their lives, or their plans for the future, or about whatever pleasant nothing they want, not about state surveillance and penalties for treason. When she’s at home, she should be making time for her siblings, or for her mother, who clearly needs someone to talk to, rather than mapping out ghost sightings in Hawkins. She’s not supposed to be single-minded, intense, ruthless and calculating, determined and uncompromising in her quest to find the truth. She’s not supposed to be cold.”  


“ _Nancy._ ”  


She placed the fifth piece onto the construction, above Barb’s head, fastening it securely with copper tape.  


“Sometimes,” said Nancy, and her voice was very quiet now, “I think that Nancy Wheeler might have died when you did, Barb. I don’t know who this is now, but I don’t think it’s her any more.”  


She picked up the final piece of foil-plated wood from her bed, and walked towards the figure in the glimmering box, and then stopped just in front of her.  


“If I’m right,” she said, “and I think I am, when I put this into place, the radio signal won’t be able to get through into the box, wherever it is that it’s coming from. You’ll stop existing. You can stop me if you want.”  


The figure did not move.  


“Maybe that won’t make a difference,” Nancy continued. “Maybe you’ll just appear in a different part of my room – I mean, I’m not stopping the signal, just cutting it off from this one particular place. Maybe, when I open the box to check, you’ll just spring back into existence. But – I don’t know – it doesn’t feel like that’s the case. I can’t explain it. It just feels that way.”  


There was nothing – no sound, no movement – from the figure standing in front of her.  


“So, when I put this on,” said Nancy, “I probably won’t see you again. Not this version, at least. You’re always going to be in my dreams, and my memories. But, if I’m right, if I’m lucky, then they won’t make it out of my head any more, like you seem to have done.”  


Still nothing.  


“So,” said Nancy, wishing that she could find some excuse to delay the moment a little bit longer, and knowing that she could not, “I think this might be goodbye.”  


She lifted the piece of wood, and placed it lightly onto the frame, and slid it into place. And, as she was covering the holes in tape, she thought that she heard a voice whisper, “ _Goodbye, Nancy._ ”  


And it was done, and she sank down to the floor. And then she remembered that this was not quite the end of the experiment, so she looked around the room, but there was nobody else there, and then – after she had timed five minutes on her alarm clock – slowly, gingerly, she slid the box open.  


There was nothing inside. Just an empty space, where Barbara Holland had once been, in some form or another.  


Nancy Wheeler sat down, and let out a deep breath, and smiled a watery smile with absolutely no joy in it whatsoever, and cried quietly until the morning came.  


*******

Jim Hopper watched silently as his body kicked the door down, and ignored the jolt of pain that ran through his leg. He was trying to concentrate.  


It had not been a particularly long drive, once It had secured a new car for them, stepping out into the middle of the road and waiting for it to come to a stop. The driver had been quite friendly and accommodating, but that had not stopped It from strangling him and putting his body in the trunk, where it still remained. And then, from there, they had driven for perhaps forty-five minutes, down to Richmond, to a relatively anonymous house in what appeared to be the unfashionable part of the suburbs, where It had drawn the car to a halt and stepped out. And, throughout that journey, Hopper had been thinking about one thing and one thing only – trying, desperately trying, to gain some kind of foothold or purchase over the brain that had once belonged to him, trying to do something, anything.  


There was a clattering from further inside the house, and a grey-haired, half-bearded man rushed out from one of the doors into the hallway, carrying a slightly rusted rifle. Hopper recognised him, he realised with an unpleasant jolt; they’d grown up together, after all, or at least in the vicinity of one another, and he had not changed very much in appearance since back in 1983, when Hopper had last seen him.  


“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” said Lonnie Byers, his voice raised, as he brandished the rifle. “I’ll call the cops –“  


“Really, Lonnie?” It said through Hopper’s lips. “Forgotten me that quickly? Forgotten that I’m already a cop?”  


“Jesus,” said Lonnie, blinking. “Jim? What the hell – you don’t look the same –“  


Hopper, vaguely registering these words as he tried to throw the weight of his mind against that of the Mind Flayer, acknowledged with a faint dark humour that Lonnie was probably right. He hadn’t exactly kept up standards when he’d been stranded in the Upside-Down, after all, and nor had It when it had taken possession of his body.  


“Ah, there we go,” said the Mind Flayer, with a chuckle. “It all comes back, doesn’t it?”  


“They said that you were dead,” said Lonnie, sounding confused. “When I went back there, to Hawkins, they said –“  


“They say a lot of things,” It said, offhandedly. “But it’s good to hear that you went back there recently. You might be able to help me out with something.”  


A flash of defiance showed in Lonnie’s eyes. “I don’t have to tell you anything, Jim. This isn’t your jurisdiction.”  


“Oh, Lonnie,” said the Mind Flayer. “I don’t think you know how wrong you are about that. And it would really be in your best interests to talk to me.”  


It lifted Hopper’s head, and stared right into Lonnie’s eyes, and the other man flinched, tearing his eyes away. Hopper wondered what Lonnie had seen there, and then wondered whether it would be the sort of thing that would scare him any more, now that he had seen everything that he had seen.  


“Fine,” said Lonnie, his voice low. “Yeah, I went back. Back in October or whenever. Wanted to find Joyce – you know, try and make things work again, I was prepared to give her another chance – but she wasn’t there. Nor were you, Jim. They said that you’d died in a fire, and that Joyce had moved away because she was heartbroken or some shit like that.” His face twisted in anger. “Should have known she’d start sleeping around as soon as I was out of the picture. Thought she’d have had better taste in men than you or that little shit New Age Newby, but there you go.”  


It tilted its head, and smiled slightly. Hopper could feel It now, could feel the way that its focus shifted and changed whenever it wanted to do anything with his body, like the movement of icebergs in a cold ocean, and it felt like an opening that he might be able to use.  


“But yeah,” said Lonnie. “Why do you care?”  


“Because, Lonnie,” It said, “I know that you know where she went, her and the whole family. I know that it’s somewhere in these parts – you moved here, didn’t you?”  


“Cynthia kicked me out of the old place,” spat Lonnie. “Crazy bitch. Always suspecting me of things, thinking she was too good for me. So I moved down here. Better for business than in fucking Indiana.”  


“Oh, of course,” said the Mind Flayer, still smiling. “But we both know that that wasn’t the main reason, don’t we, now, Lonnie? You moved to Virginia because you were following her. Waiting for her to need you again, so that you could swoop in and rescue her from herself.”  


Lonnie’s eyes darted around the room, trying to look anywhere apart from the body standing where his front door had once been, and then he nodded, reluctantly. “Yeah, fine, shoot me. Is it such a crime for a father to want to be near his sons, even if they’re both failures? Is it a punishable offence to want to support my wife when she needs it?”  


“If it was,” It said, “then you’d walk free, and we both know it. But that’s not why I’m here.”  


“Then why the fuck are you here, Jim?” asked Lonnie.  


It opened its mouth to speak, and Hopper felt the movement, and seized on it, forcing his gathered will into the weakest point of the implacable wall that was the weight of another mind, and he felt something give way, ever so slightly. The Mind Flayer did not seem to notice this, possibly because it would have been nothing more than a pinprick to an elephant.  


“Here’s what I want, Lonnie,” It said, whilst Hopper pushed against it with all his force. “I want you to tell me where she went.”  


“Oh, I get it,” said Lonnie, chuckling to himself. “You’ve come back from the dead, or wherever you were hiding, and you want to jump back into my wife’s bed, do you?”  


“Lonnie,” It said, and its voice was different, lower, darker, as it strode forwards, into the hallway, coming to stand only a few feet from the other man, “tell me. Now.”  


“You found me,” said Lonnie, cautiously. “Why can’t you find her?”  


It hissed slightly, and Hopper took advantage of its irritation to force the crack slightly further open, to push further into the brain that had once been his and his alone. “I had no control over the information, the memories, I could gather. An old drinking buddy of yours knew where you had gone to. But the ones that knew her, they were harder nuts to crack. I only found fragments, pieces of memory, and none of them tremendously relevant. But you know, don’t you?”  


“Memories?” said Lonnie, now sounding utterly bemused. “I’ve got no fucking idea what you’re talking about, Jim.”  


It snarled, and Hopper threw his weight against its mind again, and felt something give way.  


“Why are you winking at me?” said Lonnie. “What are you – what’s fucking happening here?”  


“I’m not winking,” said the Mind Flayer, confusion in its tone for the first time.  


“Yeah, you are,” said Lonnie. “Are you – are you on something?”  


Hopper stopped winking. It was all he seemed to be able to do with the meagre few inches of ground he had gained, but it felt good nonetheless, for a mind that had not been able to move any part of its body for over a month.  


It merely snarled again, and batted the rifle aside contemptuously, sending it clattering to the floor, and – as Lonnie scrambled back against the wall – it closed the distance between them, and grabbed the other man by his collar, and dragged him into one of the rooms, throwing him down onto the yellow carpet. Once again, just like back in the truck, Hopper braced himself mentally, for he knew what was going to happen next, even if Lonnie did not entirely seem to.  


“Tell me,” It said, and there was no pretence any more in its voice that it was anything like the old Jim Hopper, for it sounded hollow and corrosive. “Tell me where she went, Lonnie Byers. Her and her little family. Tell me now, and I will leave.”  


“I don’t understand –“  


“ _Tell me._ ”  


“Fine,” said Lonnie, spitting onto the carpet. “It’s called Winterton. Pointless town on the coast, down by Newport News. I don’t know which house, because the fucking lawyers were useless at their jobs, and I haven’t been there yet, but that’s the place. Now just get the fuck away from me.”  


“Winterton,” said the Mind Flayer, rolling the name around its mouth, as Hopper sighed, faintly disgusted at how quickly Lonnie had capitulated, and retreated back into the stronghold at the corner of the brain where It had let him live for its own sick amusement. “I see. Thank you, Lonnie Byers. You’ve been very helpful.”  


“Yeah, great,” said Lonnie. “Now are you going to leave me alone?”  


“Absolutely,” It said. “In fact, you won’t ever see me again.”  


Hopper knew it was coming, and knew what sort of person it was happening to, but the sound of the man’s neck snapping, the final terrified gasp of breath, was still deeply unpleasant to listen to. And then It strode back out to the car – Hopper took one last look at Lonnie lying there with his neck at an unnatural angle, blood staining the hideous carpet – and dragged the body in the trunk into the hallway, where it was dumped and promptly abandoned.  


And then it was back in the car, and driving again, and as they drove, Hopper winked, again and again, because he was going to need a hell of a lot more control over his brain and his body than he currently had, where they were going.  


*******

Silently, they crouched in the drainage ditch beneath the bridge, and listened to the sounds of the Vestige walking overhead.  


It was amazing, really, Josh thought in a detached way, how quickly it all came back. Running, hiding, fearing for one’s life; he’d thought to himself, in those first few weeks after leaving Lebanon when he still believed that their application for asylum would be accepted, that he would never have to go through that again. But here he was, Coşkun Bateyi of Karabey, once again cowering in the undergrowth as the people who wanted to kill him went by.  


Will was just as silent as he was. Josh had glanced over at him several times, at the muddy bush-covered alcove in the ditch where the other boy was crouching, and had not seen anything on his face apart from perfect stillness and concentration. He’d told them, after all, when he’d told the story of the last few years, that he was good at hiding, and Josh felt like he was beginning to understand how Will Byers had somehow managed to last for an entire week in the hell dimension where the monsters lived.  


And, eventually, the footsteps receded into the distance, and the two of them looked nervously at one another, and finally nodded.  


“Are you OK?” whispered Josh.  


“Fine,” replied Will, nodding. His tone was controlled, clipped, like someone trying not to think about things, which Josh understood. “What’s our next move from here?”  


“No idea,” said Josh. “I’d only thought ahead as far as getting out of the burning house, if I’m being honest. Your turn.”  


Will smiled slightly, a small quirk of the lips. “Fair’s fair, I suppose.”  


“Let’s hear it, then,” said Josh. “I mean, we all know that you’re the leader here anyway, of our little merry band. Let’s make a plan.”  


“I’m not the leader –“ Will began, but Josh rolled his eyes and it somehow seemed to shut the other boy up.  


“Yeah, you are,” said Josh. “You’re the hero, Will. Of this whole story. You’re the one who was stolen, who survived, who fought off possession and invasion several times, who kept a secret for years and made it out just as strong despite all that. You’re the one it wants, and you’re the one that we need to win. If you’re not the hero, then I don’t know who is.”  


Their eyes met, for just a fraction of a second, and Josh was determined not to look away in embarrassment like he normally did, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Will was the first one to break their gaze, turning his eyes to the floor sheepishly.  


“I’m really not,” said Will. “I’m just the one that the Demogorgon took. I’m not some superhero. I’m not the Man Who Saved The World. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”  


“Yeah,” said Josh, slightly thrown by the fact that Will had apparently remembered the name of his favourite film. “But you’ve become a hell of a lot more than that since.”  


Will looked back up at him, and blinked a couple of times, and took a deep breath, as though he were about to say something, and then his eyes narrowed in concentration.  


“What is it?” said Josh.  


“Listen,” whispered Will. “Far away, but getting closer.”  


“Sounds like a car,” said Josh, straining to hear. “Going at basically one mile per hour, by the sounds of it. Wait, do you think it’s Murray’s van?”  


Will shook his head. “No. I think…”  


He trailed off, and raised his hand to the back of his neck, and Josh realised what he meant.  


“Ah,” said Josh. “Here we go again, then.”  


They burrowed back into their hiding places, under the vegetation and into the side of the muddy banks of the ditch, and as the car drew closer, Josh heard the voice.  


It was crackly and faint, clearly being played through a fairly low-quality sound system of some kind, but it sounded familiar, the blank and inhuman tones of the Vestige, repeating a message over and over again.  


“ _Will Byers_ ,” it said. “ _Come out and play, and bring your friends. You know what we are. You know what we want._ ”  


The car was very close now, slowly trundling along the road and onto the bridge, but it did not sound as though it was slowing down.  


“ _You know the nature of the people we take,_ ” it continued, hissing and crackling with static. “ _And so you should be able to work out who will receive our blessing next. Come and find us if you wish to stop this from happening. Join us, Will. Join Us._ ”  


Josh was barely breathing now, although there was no way that the Vestige would have been able to hear him over the sound of the voice and the engine, but he was still relieved when the car kept moving, slowly rolling away, as the message began to repeat itself once again. Finally, it was far enough away that Josh felt safe in leaning forwards slightly, away from the damp ground, and shifting the branch from off his face.  


Will was already sitting up.  


“No,” said Josh, shaking his head. “I know what you’re thinking. We can’t just rush in, just sacrifice ourselves.”  


“They’ve got someone,” said Will.  


“And they haven’t got us,” said Josh. “If they’re taking hostages, then they know that they can’t find us any other way. The ball’s in our court.”  


“Who is it, though?” said Will. “They said that we’d know. They know that we’ve figured out the whole working-class thing, somehow, probably bugged our house or something. And they knew that you were here as well, they said to bring my friends. So…”  


“Oh,” said Josh, quite quietly, as a horrifying possibility quite abruptly occurred to him, and seized control of his mind without any chance for rational consultation. “Oh.”  


“What?”  


“People on the margins, you said?” asked Josh, trying to keep his voice level as he shifted uneasily from one leg to the other. “People who are vulnerable and afraid, who don’t have anyone checking up on them. People who are beaten down by work, day in and day out, but keep doing it because they’ve got mouths to feed, because they have to. People who are on the edge of giving up. That’s what the Vestige likes. Right?”  


“Right,” said Will, his tone hesitant.  


“Will,” said Josh, “I think they’ve taken my father.”  


*******

“Ives?” said Kali, for the name was familiar, on the edge of her mind.  


“Ives,” confirmed the floating woman with a sad smile, radiant in the dim white light which bathed her body. “I’m Jane’s mother, Kali. The one she was stolen from, all those years ago.”  


Kali’s eyes widened as she realised. “Oh, god, of course. But you’re – you were dead –“  


“Not really,” said Terry Ives. “Brain-dead, perhaps, but not completely gone. Or, at least, the reports all said brain-dead.”  


“And what’s the truth?” said Nikolay. His voice was quieter than usual, Kali noticed, which was followed by the realisation than his arm was bleeding profusely from the long and deep scars left by the Flower-Shark’s teeth.  


“I was here,” said Terry, quite simply. “Or, rather, not there. Somewhere else.”  


Kali shook her head, trying to understand. “But you weren’t one of us – how did you open a portal?”  


“I didn’t,” said Terry, smiling somehow. “I’ve wondered about this a lot in the last fifteen years, Kali, but I think that the electricity, the shock treatment, must have temporarily awakened something in my mind. After all, my daughter must have got her talents from somewhere, right?”  


“Recessive genes, perhaps,” muttered Nikolay, mostly to himself. “You and the father both, I suspect.”  


“And it transported you here?” said Kali.  


“Well,” said Terry, “if you call my disembodied mind ‘me’, then yes. But not just here.”  


“What do you mean?”  


Terry looked at the two of them, and there was an odd compassion in her eyes. “Will you walk with me? Can you?”  


The second question was addressed to Nikolay, who had sunk into a crouch at some point, cradling his arm with his other one, but he nodded, and rose to his feet. “I can try. But the blood – it’ll draw the Flower-Sharks –“  


“You have nothing to fear from the monsters,” said Terry. “They stay away from me. I think they’re scared of the Light.”  


Kali frowned as they began to walk, her and Nikolay on the ash-stained moss that covered the floor, and Terry a few inches above it. “Where’s it coming from? Your light?”  


“It’s a long story,” said Terry, “and I don’t understand the vast majority of it. All I know is that I’m not always here, in this shadowy world with the monsters. Sometimes I slip away, and I go to this bright place, somewhere else. I can’t control when I go there, or anything about that place. But it’s empty, and it’s safe. And sometimes I can hear the sounds of the real world from there, very distant, like there’s miles between us. But I still like it.”  


Her face had taken on a wistful sort of air to it, and Kali could not tear herself away from it, for this was the woman she had been seeing in her dreams, more and more, since they had come into the Shadow World and made it closer and closer to Hawkins. She looked like Jane, as well, now that Kali knew what to look for; there was something in the eyes, the deep certain calmness and honesty that shone through them.  


“Where are you taking us?” said Nikolay. “I don’t suppose you know the way out, do you?”  


Kali rolled her eyes. “If she knew the way out, Palenko, she wouldn’t have spent fifteen years here, would she?”  


Nikolay said nothing, and Kali felt a mild stab of guilt for being rude to a man who was bleeding out because he’d stuck his arm into a monster’s mouth and saved her life.  


“No,” said Terry, mildly. “Not quite, Kali. I think I know how you might be able to get out. But I don’t think it’s a way that I can follow.”  


They kept walking, through the empty streets, as the ash billowed and fell around them, like snow on a Christmas-card, and eventually, they came to a slight rise, at the top of which stood a low building. Kali squinted through the blizzard, and made out a sign; although it was overgrown with creeping grey vines and brown tendrils, she could vaguely make out the word ‘Methodist’ beneath it.  


“Let me tell you a story,” said Terry, and for a split-second, Kali was filled with a strange false nostalgia for a world that had never existed and that could never have existed, where this woman had told bedtime stories to her and Jane each night. “Have you seen the stars here?”  


“We have indeed,” said Nikolay. “If those are stars. They look more like…holes in the night to me.”  


“They are,” said Terry. “But, once, several years ago now, one of those stars fell to Earth, somehow. I don’t know how a hole in the skin of the universe can move, but it did, and it fell, and it landed in the centre of Hawkins and lay smouldering for many days and nights. All of the monsters stayed away from it, stayed well away. Not just the ones that walk upright, the ones that you call the Flower-Sharks, but everything else as well. Even the Great Enemy gave it a wide berth.”  


“What’s the Great Enemy?” said Kali.  


“The king of the monsters,” said Terry. “I haven’t seen it in almost a year now – it comes and goes – but it’s an enormous spider made of shadows and smoke, towering over all the buildings and trees, reaching into the stormclouds. Sometimes you can hear it think, if you’re close enough, and its thoughts are made entirely of malice and hatred and vindictive desire to spread and grow and rule. But even that thing, that demon, stayed well away from the fallen star, and one night, I decided that I was going to go and see what it looked like.”  


The doors of the church stood open, and they walked through them, into a hallway where every wall was covered in a strange grey film, like filled-in cobwebs.  


“I could get close to it,” continued Terry. “I could pass that invisible borderline which the monsters didn’t dare to cross. And it hurt my eyes to look at it, hurt behind the eyes, but I couldn’t tear myself away. And then I thought I heard voices from inside it, very very faint, and they sounded familiar. They sounded like my family, like Andrew, like Jane does today – and I didn’t know how I could know what she sounded like, but I did – and then I realised that I was starting to fade away, the longer I stood there, and I ran, and hid, for a couple of weeks, because I was scared of it. But then I found a mirror somewhere, and I realised that I was glowing with the same light from the star, the same light from the empty place where I sometimes went.”  


“And you think…” began Kali, but trailed off, because she had no idea what any of this meant.  


“I don’t know, Kali,” said Terry, softly. “But I think that the stars lead to the empty place, to the place outside this world. Maybe outside ours as well. And I think that if you can find your way into that place, into the Light, you might be able to find your way back out into the real world from there.”  


“Why haven’t you, then?” asked Nikolay. “You go there all the time.”  


Terry shook her head, ruefully. “There’s…a kind of force that stops me, repels me. Have you ever tried to push two magnets together at the same end?”  


Nikolay nodded slowly.  


“But you think we might be able to manage it?” said Kali. “You think we can break through that repulsion? You think that we can get into the star in the first place, without dying or whatever?”  


“Yes,” said Terry, nodding calmly. “Because you’ll have me to help you. As much as I can.”  


There was a strange emphasis on how she said those last few words, but Kali did not pay this too much attention, for they were in the centre of the church now, in the dead overgrown nave, and in the centre of that chamber floated the smallest of dim white lights.  


“This is the star, isn’t it?” said Kali, her voice soft. Something about it seemed to demand respect.  


Terry nodded. “It’s so much smaller now than it was, all those years ago, slowly melting away. But we might still be able to manage.”  


“So we walk into the light,” said Nikolay, who had sank onto the twisted mirror of a bench, and was lying on his side, his wounded arm raised, “and we get into the outside place, and then what? Will there be another thing to follow when we get there? Another light to spit us out in this church in the real world? Because I don’t want us to be mistaken for miracles. I’m a communist through and through.”  


Kali bit down on a slight snort of laughter, and the corner of Terry’s mouth twitched in amusement. “No, Nikolay. No light to follow, I’m afraid. I don’t think you’ll emerge here anyway.”  


“Why not?”  


“Because, in the bright place,” said Terry, “there isn’t really such a thing as geography. It doesn’t map onto our world like that. Everywhere is one, and the place that you’re standing in is everywhere.”  


“So where will we emerge?” said Kali. “I’m not going back to Russia again, I swear –“  


“I think you might be able to choose,” said Terry, but she didn’t sound certain. “To follow your own trail. I don’t know. I’ve never done it before. But I think, if I can guide you…”  


She trailed off, and – with a shock – Kali realised that the woman was crying, silent tears running down her face even as she smiled.  


“Are you alright?” she said, hesitantly.  


Terry looked at her, and said, “You’ve met Jane, haven’t you? Since she escaped?”  


“Yeah,” said Kali, nodding in confusion. “Back in ‘84, in Chicago. Not for long.”  


“Is she happy?” asked Terry. “Is she alright? Will she be alright?”  


Kali said nothing for a moment, trying to work out how to answer, and then nodded slowly. “I think she will be. She’s got a better chance than me. She had friends who she left me for, left to go and save. Another family, of sorts. And ideals. She had ideals.”  


Terry nodded slightly, and Kali looked away, into the dark corners of the church.  


“If you’ve got ideals, after everything,” she said, and she wasn’t sure who she was talking to, “then you’re not lost yet. If you still know the right thing to do.”  


A murmur of agreement left Terry’s mouth, and Kali turned back, to see that she was smiling again, the smile of someone who had made their mind up about something.  


“You will take care of her, won’t you, Kali?” said Terry. “Because she really does mean the world to me.”  


“Of course,” said Kali, and then bit her lip, trying to find the right way to say what she wanted to say. “You’re talking…you’re talking as though you’ll never see her again. If we can get back, we can try to get you back as well –“  


Terry only shook her head, calm and composed.  


“Wait a moment,” said Nikolay, his voice faint. “Ms Ives – Terry – what’s wrong? What are you going to do?”  


Terry smiled again, and in that moment, Kali knew, deep down inside.  


“I’m going to help you,” she said. “The only way I can. I’m going to let the light take me instead, and guide you into the bright place, and guide you out again if I can. We’ll walk into it together, Kali, Nikolay, and I’ll protect you from it for as long as I can. I promise.”  


“You’ll die,” said Kali, her mouth suddenly very dry.  


Terry tilted her head dismissively. “Kali, my dear, I’ve been dead for a long time now. This was just a little bit more time for me to think and move around in. And now I can see why I was given it.”  


Nikolay, slowly, rose to his feet, supporting himself against the back of the bench with his good arm. The other one had not stopped bleeding yet. “We can’t ask you to do this, Terry.”  


“Well, that’s good,” said Terry, decisively. “Because you haven’t. I’m volunteering. I’m telling you what we’re going to do. Where do you want to end up, when you get to the other side?”  


Kali and Nikolay looked at one another, considering, and then Kali said, “Brenner. Wherever he is.”  


“We need to stop him,” said Nikolay. “Before he does this again. Before he makes any more Janes.”  


Terry nodded in understanding. “If I can, I’ll take you there. I don’t know how long I’ll last.”  


Kali felt numb, slightly, as though there was something unknown that she desperately needed to be doing. “Are you sure? Please, if there’s another way –“  


“There isn’t, Kali,” said Terry. “I’m sure of this. I have to burn myself away to open the doorway, to get you back home. And, believe me, the pleasure is absolutely all mine.”  


There were tears on Kali’s cheeks now as well, and on Nikolay’s, as Terry walked calmly to stand in front of the two of them, facing the fallen star.  


“Follow me, then,” she said, smiling a defiant smile, and together, they walked steadily into the light.  


*******

Jasna’s fingers were numb and cold, but she kept digging, lifting the stones and bricks and throwing them behind her, and finally, she struck something different. It was the floor, the cold and hard earth of the ground beneath the place where the Holloway house had once stood, and nothing else.  


There were no ghosts beneath the rubble, no secret doorways into Heather’s secret realm. No Robin.  


Jasna swore, very quietly, to herself, to see whether it would help, but it did not. So she picked up one of the smaller bricks from the top of the pile, and considered it for a moment, and then hurled it with all her force against another stone, her mind filled with a helpless anger, a feeling of utter powerlessness, for the whole evening seemed to have become utterly pointless in retrospect, and the distant sounds of the nighthawks seemed to have turned into a mocking laughter, which was not a million miles away from what Jen Stanton and her friends would have said to her back in Washington. Or, perhaps, what her parents would have said.  


_You made a mistake_ , they would have told her, she thought as she flung another brick, this one splitting into fragments in a rather satisfying manner. _You made a mistake, Jasna Konstanjević, trying to make a friend. You forgot that you can’t do anything for anyone, can’t actually help them. You couldn’t stop George dying, all those years ago, and you couldn’t stop Robin dying either._  


And then, through the haze of her frustration and self-recrimination, she heard a noise.  


It was like no sound that she had ever heard before, high and thin, like some unholy hybrid of nails on a blackboard with a lion’s roar. It echoed through the trees, and was followed by another one, cruel and cutting, and Jasna froze, not daring to move, because this sound could not have been made by anything friendly or harmless.  


She stared into the darkness behind the trees, and blinked, willing her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it was not easy, with the lights from the road at her back. And then she turned slightly, and registered some kind of movement from the corner of her eyes, and spun around, and saw the monster.  


It was standing under the streetlight, motionless, and was staring right at her. It was perhaps the size of a bear, Jasna guessed, although she had never seen a bear in the flesh before, and stood on four tapering legs, but that was where the similarities ended. The creature’s face was pulsing slightly, opening and then closing along five radial lines, and its feet bore long, narrow claws, which rested on the tarmac of the road. Its skin was strange, shimmering iridescent in the yellow light, moving and shifting as though there were many smaller creatures contained within it, and oddly constricting and dilating, as if the creature was breathing with its entire body at once. Along one side, there was the faded mark of a long scar, and on its shoulder, there was another mark, significantly more recent if the charred skin and dried blood (or something like blood, at least) was anything to go by.  


“Hey,” said Jasna to the monster, straightening up and turning to face it. She had no idea where this confidence had come from all of a sudden, but it was not entirely unwelcome. “I know what you are. I’m not afraid of you. Leave me alone.”  


The monster said nothing, made no reply, but continued to stare.  


“You’re a…a demo-thing,” said Jasna, trying to remember what Nancy and Jonathan had told her of the last few years. “You’re some kind of predator from the other world, the Upside-Down, maybe some kind of puppet of the shadow monster there. You like to hunt people, to make them run so that you can chase them down. Well, I’m not doing that.”  


The monster, Jasna noticed, was tense and coiled, ready to spring, and she saw the shifting of muscles and tendons in its legs, only just holding itself in place.  


“I’m not afraid of you,” repeated Jasna, raising the brick she was holding in her hand to shoulder-height, ready to throw it. “I’ve already had a rubbish evening, and you’re not making it much worse than it already is. So leave me alone, and we can both go about our lives. We don’t have to fight.”  


It tilted its head, as if it were considering – as if it understood her words – and then, slowly and quite deliberately, took one step towards her, its claws clicking on the hard and frost-covered tarmac. Instinctively, Jasna stepped back, and her foot hit into one of the bricks on the floor, and she staggered slightly, and the moment was lost.  


The monster’s face fell open like a blossoming flower, and it shrieked again, and Jasna could see every last one of its teeth as it leapt forwards at her, and she raised the brick to strike, however dreadful a weapon it might be, because she was not going to go down without a fight –  


And then there was a great burst of sound, of warm wind, of bright light, and Jasna lost her balance on the stones and fell to the floor, and as she rolled over to look up at where the monster was, she saw that it was not there any more.  


The monster had been knocked away by the blast of air, somehow, and was picking itself up as well, a few feet away from Jasna, and it was recoiling in fear and disgust. Yet this was not the main thing that drew Jasna’s attention, as she stumbled to her feet, for there was something between her and the monster now, and it was Robin Buckley.  


“Hi,” said Robin to Jasna, over her shoulder. “Sorry about all that. I lost track of time in there a bit.”  


“Erm,” said Jasna, utterly thrown, “that’s OK, I guess. What’s happening?”  


“I have absolutely no idea,” said Robin, “but don’t tell the monster that.”  


It was cowering now, Jasna noticed, almost shrinking away from the white light that still shone from some unidentified source in the ruins of the house, and that danced across Robin’s coat and jeans; and then Robin took an experimental step towards it, and it shrieked in fear, and seemingly considered the situation for a moment, and then turned and began to gallop away, down the street.  


“It’s afraid of you,” Jasna said, wonderingly. “How are you – how’s all of this happening? How did I get this lucky?”  


“I guess you were just most in need of the cavalry,” said Robin, turning fully towards Jasna now. The white light was dimming, but it shone on her face, throwing her features into sharp relief and making tiny stars in her eyes, and she looked much calmer and more accepting than she had all those hours ago on the staircase, like something had finally come to an end. “But yeah, I’m pretty great, aren’t I?”  


Jasna looked at her, looked at the girl standing before her who had just saved her life, and silently agreed, because she had no idea exactly how she would be able to properly put her gratitude into words.  


“Come on,” said Robin, jerking her head towards the forest behind the ruins of the house. “We’ve got somewhere to be, Konstanjević. Better not be late.”  


“Where?” said Jasna, as they started to walk, and as the light slowly but surely faded into nothingness behind them. “Do you have a plan here? Because, if I’m being completely honest, I very much don’t.”  


“Not a plan,” said Robin. “Just a couple of ideas. Came to me on the way back through.”  


“Let’s hear them, then,” said Jasna.  


“We need to get to the school,” said Robin. “And then to some weird bit of lakeshore, after that.”  


“That’s not an idea. That’s an itinerary,” said Jasna. “Why are we going back to school?”  


Robin turned to face Jasna as they walked, beneath the pine trees now, under a moonlight that was much fainter and paler than the strange interdimensional light from earlier. “Not a clue. Absolutely none whatsoever. That’s the annoying thing about getting knowledge from the future by accident. But I know that that’s where we need to be in less than an hour – I know that that’s where we’re going to be – so we’d better get a move on.”  


*******

Neil stepped towards them, and Max could not step away.  


Her back was against the wall, metaphorically and literally, and there was no clear way out. Lucas and Mike seemed to be aware of this, as well; they were standing close on either side of her, like bodyguards. But then, the purpose of a bodyguard was to protect one from being attacked, and this was a somewhat difficult task when the attacker was significantly taller, heavier, stronger, and more willing to hurt people than their opponents (she glanced at Mr Clarke’s unmoving body on the floor), and especially when the attacker had no way of being dissuaded from their course of action.  


She tried nonetheless. “Neil. Seriously. Leave us alone.”  


“Maxine,” he said, in a tone more like mild annoyance than anything else, “you know as well as I do that that isn’t an option. Your disobedience is becoming tiresome now, and is utterly unacceptable. The longer you try to put up a fight, the worse your punishment will be.”  


“I’ll call the police,” said Lucas, but his words rang hollow, without conviction or belief. “Get you arrested, sent to court, sent to prison for all this.”  


Neil’s face twisted in disdain. “There’s not a jury in this state that would take my word against yours –“ he jerked his head in Lucas’s direction – “and there’s no crime to charge me with as far as Maxine is concerned. She is my daughter, and I have the right to discipline her as I see fit, as the head of the household. Now, if you don’t step away from her, then I’ll have no choice but to use force. It’s your call, Sinclair.”  


Lucas was silent, but Max could feel him seething with rage, only barely contained.  


“That’s right,” said Neil, softly, “that’s right, Sinclair. Why don’t you attack me? Show me what you’re made of, what you’re good for? Try and impress my daughter by showing her that you’re something more than just the town ni–“  


“Ghosts,” said Mike, inexplicably, and miraculously, Neil fell silent.  


Max blinked in confusion at him, and Mike blinked innocently back. With a sinking feeling, she remembered that he was still full of painkillers, and prayed that he had some kind of idea as to what he was doing.  


“What are you talking about, boy?” said Neil, his voice still low and dangerous.  


“Ghosts,” said Mike again, and Max restrained the urge to punch him. “Who are yours?”  


And Neil was absolutely still for a moment, and then there was something deep and angry in his eyes. “How do you know –“  


“Everyone’s got ghosts, these days,” said Mike, taking a step forwards, positioning himself between her and Neil. “Troy had James. Mr Clarke had Bob. Who do you have, whispering in your ear, telling you what to do?”  


Neil’s face was revealing nothing, and he was silent, as Mike continued.  


“People from the war, maybe?” he said, sounding bizarrely confident. Max wondered, for a split-second, whether she was supposed to be using this distraction to make a break for it, and then realised that this would have precisely zero chance of succeeding, and furthermore that leaving your friend as a distraction was not exactly the done thing. “Or family members? Whoever they are, I bet they were pretty insistent that you come here tonight, break and enter, commit an actual crime just because you were worried that your daughter was messing with your memories somehow –“  


Neil, without any sign, punched Mike in the stomach, and he staggered back, gasping for air and letting Lucas support him.  


“No,” he said, taking another step towards the three of them. “I don’t know how you know about my dreams, but nobody tells me what to do. I am in control here.”  


“But why –“ began Mike again, gasping, before he was silenced by another blow.  


“There’s something very wrong with all of you kids,” said Neil Hargrove, standing over them, blocking out the light. “Reading minds, meddling with my memories. Freaks, the whole lot of you. And we know what to do with freaks.”  


They had nowhere to go. They had nowhere to run.  


“Oh, yes, we know what to do,” repeated Neil, his voice almost zealous, as he flicked his gaze between the three of them, huddled against the wall. “Stop them from undermining the rest of society. Lock them up. Discipline them. Lynch them.”  


“Get away from them,” said a new voice, and Max whipped her head round, bewildered, and saw – of all people – Erica, standing in the hall doorway, dressed somewhat incongruously in bright pink pyjamas, and pointing a pistol quite confidently at Neil.  


“Erica –“ gasped Lucas, fear in his voice, but she just shook her head.  


“This man is invading our home,” she said, her voice dripping with ironclad contempt, “threatening to kill us, violating our rights as American citizens and as human beings, and we have the right to defend ourselves against that. And that’s what I’m doing. Get on the floor, you piece of shit, or I swear to God that I will shoot you. And believe me, I’ve been practicing since July for this.”  


There was an utterly still moment, where it seemed entirely and equally plausible that anything could happen, and then – somehow – Neil took a step back, holding his body very still and not taking his eyes away from the gun in Erica’s hand, and Max felt herself letting out a sigh of relief. Then she realised that the problem had not remotely gone away; it had just become fractionally less immediate.  


“Now get down onto the floor,” said Erica, who, if she was feeling the same doubt, was concealing it behind pure bravado and confidence. “Put your hands out to your sides, and lie down on the floor, right where you are.”  


Neil did not move.  


“Now,” said Max, who had not planned to say anything. “Do it, Neil.”  


“Fuck you,” said Neil, his voice controlled, as he remained standing.  


“Do it,” said Erica, more forcefully this time.  


“Or what?” said Neil, relaxing slightly. “You’ll shoot me? I don’t think so, you little –“  


There was a deafening, splitting, eruption of noise, echoing through the room, followed by a howl of pain from Neil as he collapsed onto the floor, clutching at his leg, and Erica lowered the gun slightly.  


“Guess again,” she said, but her hand was shaking now, shaking almost uncontrollably, and Max tore herself away from the wall and dashed over to where she was standing, taking the gun from Erica’s hands and continuing to train it on the prone form of Neil. Lucas was only half a second behind her, and he gathered Erica into his arms as she began to breathe louder and louder in evident shock, whispering something in her ear.  


“Now what?” said Mike, as he hobbled over towards the rest of them, still wincing in pain. “Run?”  


Lucas shook his head sharply. “Our parents are upstairs, Mike; we can’t leave them alone in a house with him –“  


“Tie him up,” said Max, firmly, because the first step of a plan was better than no plan at all.  


After a few minutes, they were standing over the bound form of Neil Hargrove, his mouth taped and his limbs tied to a heavy chair in the middle of the room, and regarding him in some confusion. Erica had calmed down slightly, but she was still clutching onto Lucas tightly, whilst Mike had been showing more and more signs of pain and fatigue, with the painkillers evidently beginning to wear off.  


“He saw the ghosts,” said Lucas. “What does that mean?”  


“He’s possessed, isn’t he?” said Erica, her voice thinner than usual. “The Mind Flayer. It’s made him do this, like it made Troy cut your face up –“ she gestured at Mike – “like it made Billy do all of that shit last summer. He’s one of them. One of the Flayed.”  


“I don’t know,” said Mike, considering, “Mr Clarke saw the ghosts as well. And he didn’t try to kill any of us.”  


“No,” said Max, as she realised. “You want to know the truth? He doesn’t need the Mind Flayer to make him do any of this.”  


Lucas was nodding, she saw, his face understanding, but Mike was squinting in confusion at her.  


“I know him,” she continued. “He wouldn’t normally have any problem with knocking a man out for standing in his way, with trying to hurt his stepdaughter if she was disobedient –“ she rolled up her sleeve, displaying the bruises – “with treating black people like they don’t have any standing in the eyes of the law. None of that’s new. It’s not possession, Wheeler. It’s just that he’s a violent, racist, homicidal maniac.”  


“But Troy –“ began Mike, touching the scars on his face, but Lucas interrupted.  


“Mike,” he said, “Troy tried to make you jump off a cliff to your certain death three years ago. He tried to cut out Dustin’s teeth. You think he’s not capable of this normally?”  


Mike, slowly, nodded in understanding.  


“There’s an easy way to test,” said Max, and she fished the lighter out of her pocket, flicking it on and moving the flame close to Neil’s face, close enough to feel the heat. His eyes were full of impotent rage and incomprehension, she saw, but there was nothing else there. No darkness, no shadow, just Neil Hargrove.  


She let the others look, and then straightened up, turning to look at them. “What do we do?”  


“Take him to the police,” said Erica. “They’ll lock him away for us. Find a nice holding cell.”  


“Not for long,” said Lucas darkly.  


“Long enough,” said Mike.  


“Long enough for what?”  


Mike winced in pain as he raised his arm to gesticulate in an incomprehensible way. “There’s a signal. Radio signal. I heard it earlier, before Troy attacked me. Words, some strange voice. That’s got to be tied to this somehow.”  


“And what are we supposed to do about it?” said Max.  


Mike shrugged. “No idea. But if we go to the school, then we can use Mr Clarke’s radio, try and pick it up and work out what it’s got to do with everything.”  


Lucas nodded slowly. “And Mr Clarke said he’d been making notes about the whole thing, conducting his own investigation. They might be at school.”  


“There’s still the monster,” said Max. “The one that attacked the bus. We tried to set a trap, but it wasn’t fooled – and it’s the three of us that it’s following, plus Dustin, wherever the hell he is –“  


“He’s not at home,” said Erica. “His mom phoned earlier, just when I was going to bed, asking if he was round here.”  


“He’ll be at Steve’s,” said Lucas. “Let’s take Neil to the police station, and then go there on the way back. And then to school, for this message.”  


Max nodded in agreement, for she had no other ideas, and as Mike went to shake Mr Clarke’s shoulder, to try and wake up the teacher, she shot Lucas a grateful glance, trying to convey a lot of different gratitudes, and he smiled slightly in reply.  


And then they were carrying the chair with Neil on it out to the Sinclairs’ truck, feeling him struggle against the restraints, and placing him awkwardly in the back as the rest of them squeezed into various seats, as Max put the keys into the ignition and moved the driver’s seat around a foot forwards. Only then, as she adjusted the mirrors, did she notice something which she felt as though she should have noticed before.  


“Guys,” she said, “the sun’s coming up.”  


“Hooray,” said Erica, flatly, from behind her.  


“No,” said Max. “It was two o’clock just now. It’s the middle of winter. It should be rising at eight, nine, something like that.”  


“It’s changed,” said Mike, quietly. “It’s not regular time dilation. It’s something weirder.”  


“It’s not our most pressing concern,” said Lucas from beside her, and Max nodded, and started the car, and began to drive into the inexplicable grey light of morning.  


*******

The corridors were silent now, and that was worse.  


El and Maria had been walking for some time now, more or less aimlessly, since the door had come down and cut them off from the Vestige. There had been relief, at first – of course there had been relief, since they had just avoided near-certain death – but then the question had arisen, once the relief had worn away, of what they were supposed to do now. They had not spoken about it, not really, because the answer – or the lack of an answer – was obvious.  


So they walked through the corridors which did not lead to an exit – corridors which should have been clinical and sterile, and which were wood-panelled and carpeted – and they waited for something to happen.  


Eventually, there was a voice.  


“El?” it said, and it sounded like Joyce. “Maria? Can you hear me?”  


Maria glanced at El, in a silent question, and El lifted her finger to her lips, because for all she knew, the Vestige was trying to trap them. They said nothing.  


“It’s your – it’s Joyce,” said the voice. “I’m in the control room, up above, and I can see you on the cameras, but I can’t hear you. If you can hear me, then nod.”  


El considered this for a moment, and decided that she couldn’t think of any way that nodding would lead them into a trap, so did so, Maria following her a second later.  


“Oh, thank god,” said Joyce’s disembodied voice. “Girls, you need to listen to me very carefully, OK?”  


El nodded again, slowly.  


“The Vestige is trying to get through the doors we’ve closed,” Joyce continued. “They’re strong doors, but they can’t last forever. When they’re through, they’ll come for you, and they’ve got the numbers to overwhelm you. They’ve either converted or killed everyone on this floor, we think.”  


Maria’s face was a pale white, and her eyes were full of fear, and El realised that Joyce was presumably including Mr Glenny in the total. She took her friend’s hand, because that was the only thing that she could think of to do.  


“We’re going to try and rescue you,” said Joyce. “But you’ll have to hide until then. There’s a secure room not far from you now – the morgue – and if you wait in there, then we should be able to hold the doors until Axel and Funshine have cleared the way out for you. I promise you, we’ll be able to get you out of there. I promise.”  


El was very still for a second, and then nodded. There were a lot of things that she wanted to ask Joyce – where the hiding-place was, how long their rescuers would be, what the word ‘morgue’ actually meant – but these were secondary questions.  


It was almost frightening, she thought to herself, how quickly she could slip back into thinking like this, like it was 1983 again. But then, she supposed, if you’d been on the run once, fearing for your life and knowing that it might be ended or worse if you made a mistake, then the experience would never be forgotten. Not really.  


“Go down to the end of the corridor,” said Joyce, and they began to walk, slower than before, more cautiously. “Then turn left, and go to the junction. On your right, you’ll see a big metal door. Turn the handle three times clockwise and it should slide open; it’ll close behind you the same way once you’re through. And then I’ll seal the door from up here, and you’ll have to wait there.”  


For some time, there was no sound at all apart from their footsteps against carpeted floor, and then there was a faint clanging sound from somewhere in the distance, and deep down, El knew what it meant. It was the sound of the Vestige beginning to break through the doors.  


“El,” said Joyce again, over the hidden speakers, and her voice sounded different, like she was desperately trying to keep it level. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry – I brought us into this, into this whole trap of a hospital – and now you’re paying the price. I promise you, I’ll get you out of there no matter what it takes.”  


And then they were at the door, and Maria spun the wheel, frantically, and the door slid open, and they stepped into a silvery-grey room. The door closed, and a second later, there was the sound of another door descending in front of it, locking into place, and then there was nothing but silence.  


“What’s a morgue?” said El, eventually, after several minutes. They were sitting with their backs against one of the far walls, not taking their eyes off the door; but there was another door behind them, into a much larger and colder room, filled with strange locked cupboards of some kind but otherwise empty.  


Maria jumped slightly, startled, and then blinked in confusion at El. “Don’t you know?”  


“It was never one of my words,” said El. “And I don’t think it’s in any of the books I’ve read. Do you know?”  


Maria nodded slightly. “It’s. Erm. It’s a sort of thing that they have to have in hospitals. It’s a room where they take people when they’ve died. Where they keep them. In a morgue.”  


El, silently, digested this, and realised with a very slow horror what the cupboards in the other room might be containing. Suddenly, Maria’s unease made a lot more sense; she had assumed that the other girl was worried about their situation, but she had seemed a lot calmer outside, instead of glancing nervously around the grey room every few seconds.  


“How long do they keep the bodies?” said El, quietly.  


Maria looked somewhat uneasy, but shrugged. “Until the funeral, normally.”  


“How long does that normally take?”  


“I don’t know. A couple of weeks, at most?”  


She was not sure what to say. She did not know why she was asking these things, why she felt like she needed to know them all of a sudden; but that was what it was, a necessity, a need for this knowledge, for the whole process to be made clear and to make sense.  


“El,” said Maria, softly, cautiously, “you told me that your dad died back in July. Didn’t you find out about all this then?”  


El shook her head slightly, and ignored the feeling in her heart, the movement. “No. Different. Just ashes.”  


Maria looked at her, sympathy in her eyes, and shuffled closer, and put her arm around El’s shoulders, drawing her closer. “I’m sorry.”  


“It’s OK,” said El, very quietly. “It’s over.”  


And they sat there, the two girls, their backs against the polished wall of the morgue, as they waited for the monsters to come.  


*******

“This must be the place,” said Will, as they looked at the great rotten birch tree that stood before them, and the great dark hole beneath it, among the roots.  


“It fits,” agreed Josh. “Close enough to where we found Mr Glenny. Far enough from the road. Footprints and tracks and stuff.”  


“And,” said Will, glancing sideways at Josh to check his reaction, “it’s a spooky cave in the woods. Where else would the Vestige hide?”  


As hoped for, Josh smiled slightly in amusement, although it did not detract from the air of worry he had been projecting for the last hour or thereabouts, since they had left the ditch.  


“Josh,” said Will, turning to him more fully, “he’ll be fine. Your father. They won’t have risked trying to convert him, since we could have arrived at any minute while they were all distracted. And besides, you don’t kill your hostages before the deal.”  


“Yeah,” said Josh. “Yeah, I know. I know all that. Fully and completely.”  


“Then…”  


“That’s sort of the problem,” continued Josh. “Rationally, sure, I know that my dad’s probably not been turned into one of them. It’s not good tactics on their part, after all, like you say. But there’s still that other part of me, you know? The part that won’t stop worrying, the part that doesn’t listen to the rational side, the part that keeps making me think about the worst-case scenario. It never shuts up, and I really wish it would.”  


Will nodded. “I know. Believe me, I know.”  


The sun was getting lower in the sky now, and the shadows on the forest floor were just as long as the things that they were mirroring, as the light of a mid-afternoon in winter shone through the bare branches.  


“But, here’s the thing,” said Will. “That voice – the voice that tells you that it’ll all go wrong, that all the rational reasons for things are basically useless – you know that it’s not the truth, right, that it’s not what you actually think? And I guess that if you know that, then you’re halfway to being able to ignore it, and keep going.”  


Josh quietly nodded. “Yeah. It’s like that television show once said.”  


“What show?”  


“No idea. Saw it once, back in Lebanon on some pirated videotape, when we were trying to learn English by watching all the English television we could find. There was this old guy, grey hair, on some jungle planet. They were fighting weird robot things, tanks with laser guns. It doesn’t matter. And he turned to the girl there, and he said, ‘Courage isn’t a matter of not being frightened. It’s being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway.’”  


Will nodded, feeling a half-smile cross his face.  


“So let’s do it,” finished Josh, slightly awkwardly.  


Will tore his gaze away from Josh, from the boy standing beside him covered in mud with sharp and glinting eyes, and turned to look at the decaying tree before them. “Let’s do it.”  


“Is everything prepared?”  


“Hang on a moment.”  


A minute or so passed, as Will made the necessary preparations, and then he walked back over to Josh. “It’s ready.”  


Josh nodded, and tried to smile, and took a step forwards, and then turned to Will. “Oh. Erm. By the way. One last thing, before…”  


“What is it?”  


Josh seemed to be waging some silent struggle with himself, biting his lip slightly and darting his eyes in every conceivable direction, and then he said, “I just wanted to say. I’m really glad that I met you, Will Byers.”  


The words struck Will somehow, in an odd and unexpected way, almost as though they possessed a genuine physical weight, and he blinked to try and cover his disorientation. “I’m glad that I met you too. I, erm, don’t really think there’s anyone I’d rather have by my side here.”  


And they walked into the cave, into the darkness.  


There was a tunnel, beneath and between the tangled, rotting roots, the air heavy with the damp taste of soil, and then there was a brightness at the end, and they emerged into a chamber, filled with many people.  


They were standing in a loose kind of formation, spread out across the floor of the cave in concentric circles, each and every one of them staring outwards. There was something at the centre of the chamber, something carved and massive, but Will could not make it out very well, for it was in the only shadow in the room. Light, a sickly yellow light, emanated from the low ceiling, casting the roots and the trunk above them into sharp relief, making shadows on the beetle-eaten wood, and illuminating the faces of the figures who stood in waiting.  


“Will Byers,” they said, and it did not matter which one of them was speaking. “Welcome.”  


“Set him free,” said Will, his voice steady. “Let him go.”  


The Vestige laughed, unearthly, passing the laughter from one body to the next like a game of pass-the-parcel, and then, just as suddenly as it had started, it fell silent. “But we have been working on this one for such a long time. He is almost ours, now.”  


“How long?” said Josh, and his voice was less calm. “How long have you been trying to convert him?”  


“Weeks,” said one.  


“Maybe months,” said another.  


“He is injured,” said another. “He is vulnerable. He is almost ready to join Us.”  


“What do you mean?” said Josh. “Injured? How?”  


“His mind suffers,” said the Vestige. “Under the strain of work and responsibilities and obligations, under the fear and despair and the knowledge that it will never come to an end. And the suffering has carved out a great empty space inside him, all ready for Us to fill it.”  


“I’ll ask again,” said Will, his voice calm. “Give him to us. Or Josh will shoot me, and then you’ll never get your memories.”  


Josh, silently, pulled a gun from his coat pocket, and clicked the safety catch off, and levelled it at Will.  


The Vestige was silent for a moment, eerily so, and then – in unison – the thirty people that stood in that cave shook their heads. “No. He will not.”  


“I totally will,” said Josh. “You want to risk losing this?”  


“Go on, then,” said the Vestige. “Kill him. If you can.”  


Josh was still, utterly still, and then – the minutest fraction of a movement – he shook his head.  


“I’m sorry,” he whispered to Will, his eyes closed.  


“It’s alright,” whispered Will, and reached for Josh’s hand.  


He took the gun from it, and pointed it at his own head.  


“He might not,” said Will, “but I would. If it means that you can’t conquer the world. In a heartbeat.”  


“You’re bluffing,” said the Vestige, but it sounded just slightly less confident than before.  


“Shame you don’t have my memories,” said Will. “Because if you did, then you’d know. I’ve done this before.”  


The Vestige was silent.  


“Two years ago,” said Will, “when you – I mean, the real you, not this useless parody – possessed me, I thought I was going to die. I told my friends, as best as I could, to close the Gate; and I knew that it would mean the death of me, because I knew that _he_ would kill me the minute the connection began to waver. Can’t have someone getting their hands on those memories, after all. But I was prepared to die, then – I would have died, if they hadn’t burnt him out of me in time – and I’d do it again.”  


The Vestige said nothing, but Will could almost hear the sound of it calculating, deciding.  


And then, it smiled.  


“Maybe you should tell this to our captive,” said thirty people, trading the words between them. “Tell him how you fought us, Will Byers. He has been trying to do the same for weeks now, little knowing that we were making inroads into his mind whilst he worked and toiled and slept his life away. Tell him how you resisted, how you struggled. He might like to know, before he evaporates away, and becomes merely a part of Us.”  


They began to move, stepping to the sides, clearing a view to the great structure in the centre of the room, a twisted throne carved out of the heart of the dead tree, and upon the throne sat a figure, in shadow. And then, slowly, the yellow light began to spread, onto the throne, onto the figure, onto its familiar face.  


“Will,” said Jonathan Byers, through stiff lips, and there was a tear at the corner of his eye. “I’m sorry.”  


*******

Steve looked at the gun, and at the man who was about to kill him, and time slowed to a crawl in the light of the glowing red wall beside them. It was funny, he realised, what sort of effect impending death had on the mind.  


There was no way to run, not quickly enough. Certainly not quicker than a bullet, and surely no quicker than Waxham’s reactions; the man was a spy who had been impersonating a policeman for months.  


There did not seem to be any way of talking them out of the situation. They were a long way past that point, and – quite frankly – that option had been closed off from the second that the two of them had realised that Waxham was not the man he appeared to be. Everything else, the revelations of his plans, of his allegiance, of the Sovereign Group, that had all been delaying the inevitable.  


So, if there was no way to talk and no way to run…  


Steve, acting on an instinct born of pure and untrammelled desperation, threw himself at Waxham, and grabbed at the gun with one hand as he aimed a punch with the other.  


There was a bang, deafening at the close range, sending sharp waves of pain down each of Steve’s ear canals and a jolt up his arm with the recoil, but this was the least of his worries, for he was overbalancing, missing Waxham’s head with his other hand even as he stumbled, and the spy, contemptuously, swung an elbow down onto Steve’s leading arm, knocking it away with a stabbing force.  


And then Dustin was there, as if from nowhere, ploughing into Waxham with his shoulder, and the spy staggered backwards, visibly winded, and he tripped on the uneven ground, landing in the stream that ran across the laboratory floor.  


But Waxham still had the gun, and he rolled over, out of the stream, and levelled it at Dustin, and Steve flung himself at Waxham, hearing the gunshot a fraction of a second after the arm holding it had been knocked to the side by the weight of his body, grabbing at the cold metal himself. And then they were struggling on top of one another, Steve and Waxham, trying to wrench the gun from the other one’s grasp, as Waxham sank blow after blow into Steve’s torso.  


Dustin was there, and then Waxham kicked his legs out, and the other boy fell as well, slipping in the stream and landing besides them, and Steve would have focused more on this, but Waxham jerked his head forwards sharply, and the forehead connected with Steve’s nose, and pain erupted across his face in the immediate wake of the horrible crunching sound. But it was not important, because he almost had the gun now, and he sank his fingernails into the flesh of Waxham’s wrist, and the spy flinched instinctively, and there was another gunshot, and the sound of glass shattering.  


“Steve!” shouted Dustin, and then made a strange gurgling sound as Waxham kicked him full in the stomach, a moment before he pushed Steve’s body off his own, and landed another solid punch against his face. But the gun – Steve still had hold of the gun, and as Waxham leaned back for another blow, Steve rolled his weight to one side, and then threw it back, onto Waxham’s arm, and he heard the sound of something splintering, and the gun was his all of a sudden, Waxham’s grip loosening.  


But the spy had not given up, for he pulled his arm out from underneath Steve, and then raised himself to his unsteady feet, and as Steve did the same, Waxham caught him firmly in the chest with his knee, and Steve fell again, sprawling on the floor. And then Waxham was on top of him, gripping him by the neck with one hand and clutching ever tighter, whilst the other one pinned down the arm holding the gun.  


“Dustin,” gasped Steve, and then realised he did not have enough access to air to do things like this; the other boy was slowly rising to his feet, but slowly, too slowly, as Waxham grabbed Steve’s wrist, and smashed it against the cold rock of the floor, and Steve knew that he would not be able to keep hold of the gun much longer, so – closing his eyes – he pulled the trigger, not entirely caring where the bullets went as long as they were not in the direction of Dustin, as many times as he could until there were no more bullets, and then he dropped it, dropped the gun, and feebly tried to struggle against the grip on his neck, to no avail.  


And then it was loosened, and Waxham was rolling on the floor beside him, as Dustin stood over him, and pulled him to his feet.  


“Thanks,” said Steve, through a hoarse throat, while Waxham slowly stood as well.  


“Steve,” said Dustin, and he was not looking at Waxham. “We’ve got to get out of here.”  


And Steve noticed that Waxham was not looking at them any more, but was staring in the same direction that Dustin was, and he turned to look.  


The whole of the laboratory – the glass cylinders, the pipes, the tubes and funnels and pieces of equipment that Steve would never have remembered the name of – was lying at a strange angle, slumped against the wall beside it. Some of the glass instruments were shattered, and Steve realised that one of the bullets must have caught them; far more were cracked and leaking liquid from where they had smashed into the wall. And electricity, the blue crackling electricity which had been peacefully electrolysing the lake of dull grey fluid, was leaping away from the glass, into the wall itself.  


But, no, that was not the main thing here.  


The wall was cracked, hairline fractures running across it in all directions, and they were widening. And along these lines, the red light of the wall was shining brighter than ever before, powerful and caustic against Steve’s eyes, as the fractures kept spreading (into the other walls, into the ceiling, into the floor), and the wall began to slowly break into pieces, into fragments of incandescent darkness.  


And, through the blinding light, as his eyes adjusted, Steve could faintly see something else slowly coming into being right there, a great dark vista fading into existence before them, and it looked like another world.  


*******

“Hey,” said Robin, in the darkness, as the night creatures sang around them. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”  


Jasna considered the question. Her initial impulse – to explain her thoughts on theology, and the lack of rigorous grounding for any clear-cut notions of the soul – was pushed to one side, because something told her that it was not what Robin was asking. And, in any case, she felt strange in some unexplained way, for although she found it a lot easier than normal to speak without second-guessing herself when she was around Robin, this somehow seemed to place a much higher burden on the things that she said to not be strange or unwelcome or to not scare the other girl away.  


“No,” she said, eventually. “No, I don’t think I do. I guess – I don’t know – I think that this is all we have. This world. This life.”  


“Yeah,” said Robin, quietly, and there was a note of contemplation in her voice, where none had existed before, as she stopped walking, and slid down to the floor, her back against a tree. She sounded different, now, Jasna realised, now that she had come back from that other place; she sounded like she was slightly closer to being at peace. “I guess I never knew what I thought before now.”  


“Did the ghosts convince you about the afterlife?” said Jasna, sitting as well, feeling a faint smile emerge from somewhere. “Somehow?”  


Robin snorted in amusement. “Well. Sort of. But not in the way that you’d think.”  


“What do you mean?” said Jasna. Far away, on the horizon, there was a light beginning to glow, the light of morning, and Robin’s face was clearer now.  


Robin shook her head, smiling a rueful smile. “I realised, back there. What an afterlife would be. It would be a place made of memories. Heaven or hell at the same time, depending on how things had gone for you in your life.”  


Jasna forced herself not to talk about Augustine and Aquinas, and instead said, “And do you think that’s a good thing?”  


Robin sighed. “I don’t know. But I think not, maybe, for a lot of people. The world’s more full of weeping than we can understand.”  


Her voice sounded different on that last sentence, and her eyes were a long way away.  


“Is that a quote from something?” said Jasna.  


Robin nodded, snapping her focus back, as enthusiasm – an enthusiasm that Jasna had not seen on Robin’s face before – blossomed across her features. “Yep. It’s from a poem, by Yeats. _The Stolen Child._ ”  


“How charmingly appropriate to this town,” said Jasna, feeling the words come from somewhere, and – miraculously – Robin laughed, a genuine laugh this time.  


“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it’s not the best, is it? It’s not quite my favourite of his, in any case.”  


“What is, then?” said Jasna, and she felt different, now, in some way that frustratingly eluded description, deeply and fundamentally different from how she had ever felt before that evening, sharp and indistinct at the same time across her entire body, unable to think clearly and yet unable to tear her focus away from every last detail of the whole situation.  


“It’s called _The Second Coming_ ,” said Robin, and for all her focus, Jasna could not distinguish the exact emotional components of the deep, yearning, distant expression on her face. “It’s one of his most famous. He wrote it in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, in a burnt-out continent and a shattered world, when nobody knew what was going to come next.”  


“How does it go?” whispered Jasna.  


Robin looked at her, into her eyes for a second, and then looked away, into the distance, into the dawn forest, and, quietly, fervently, she began to speak.  


_“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,_  


_The falcon cannot hear the falconer,_  


_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,_  


(– Will Byers stared across the subterranean chamber of birch roots into the nearly-broken eyes of his brother, with another boy by his side and thirty identical men standing in a circle around them –)  


_Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,_  


(– A truck drove through the empty streets of the early morning, carrying four children and an unconscious teacher and a bound man who wanted to kill every last one of them –)  


_The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,_  


_The ceremony of innocence is drowned,_  


(– Nancy Wheeler stopped crying, and stood – the work was not done yet – and walked to the door, and she did not cast a glance at the empty silver box that stood in the corner of the room, for it had fulfilled its task –)  


_The best lack all conviction, while the worst,_  


_Are full of passionate intensity._  


(– El sat, silently, in the silent grey morgue of a secret hospital, and tried to interpret the strange and formless thoughts swimming across her mind; and she did not think about a grey-haired man with scars on his face shaking hands with someone else in the mountains, as they both smiled –)  


_Surely some revelation is at hand,_  


(– Jasna Konstanjević stared at Robin as the blonde-haired girl recited, unable to look anywhere apart from her face; and, quite suddenly, the pristine and fully-formed realisation came to her with an odd integrity that the word she had been trying to find to describe her situation might possibly be ‘love’ –)  


_Surely the Second Coming is at hand,_  


(– Something that looked like a man with a long beard drove, faster than any reasonable speed limit, eastwards, whilst Jim Hopper pushed against the weight of its mind, pushing as hard as he could, for it was nearly at its destination –)  


_The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out,_  


_When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,_  


_Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert,_  


(– The two boys stood, side by side, staring into the spreading red light, and beyond it, they saw the distinctive sight of pale ash falling from the leaden sky –)  


_A shape with lion body and the head of a man,_  


_A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,_  


(– The white light of the impossible star that had fallen to the earth below consumed them, the three of them, the Ukrainian and the illusionist and the dead woman, and then it was all around, everywhere, a whole universe of shining emptiness –)  


_Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it,_  


_Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds._  


(– Joyce Byers rubbed her eyes in the control room of the hospital, as she watched the static of broken connections spread from screen to screen, while far beneath her, the army gathered –)  


_The darkness drops again, but now I know,_  


(– In a nondescript building called Longbow House in the capital of the nation, Samuel Owens closed his eyes, and opened them, and read the reports laid out on the desk in front of him, and shook his head to nobody in particular as he realised what he would have to do –)  


_That twenty centuries of stony sleep,_  


(– Mike Wheeler and Max Mayfield and Lucas and Erica Sinclair and the stirring body of Scott Clarke, now one passenger fewer, pulled up outside the school where a lot of this had begun, and all of them could see the ghosts standing beside the door, like an honour guard –)  


_Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,_  


(– Dustin Henderson and Steve Harrington looked into the heart of the Upside-Down, and did not see the Chief of Police beginning to run, or the ceiling beginning to crumble and give way above their heads; and a long way away, Will Byers and Josh Bateyi stood in another cave, as the world around them crumbled in a less literal sense – )  


_And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,_  


_Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?_  


The explosion, when it happened, happened everywhere to some degree, but nowhere quite as much as in the town of Hawkins.  


And, somewhere, on the wall of a young child’s bedroom and in the empty aisles of an ordinary shop, in the middle of Maple Street and by the edge of the quarry – and in a hundred other places besides, scattered across the town with no pattern or logic – the skin of the universe, quite quietly and calmly, broke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've made it this far in the story, through ever-growing chapters and ever more convoluted plots, then thank you very much for reading, and I really hope that you're enjoying this! If you have any comments on the story, regardless of how broad or specific they might be, then I'd be absolutely delighted to hear them - getting feedback from readers is a) one of the best ways of directly improving my writing, and b) incredibly flattering to hear that there are people that like this story enough to talk about it with me! 
> 
> My workload is a bit lower now, as of a couple of days ago - only PhD applications and continued work on my dissertation to be done any time soon - so hopefully, I should be able to get to work on the next chapter pretty quickly, since I do admit that I've left you all with a bit of a cliffhanger here. Coming soon, then - hopefully before the 25th December, or if not, then somewhere in that general region - Chapter 14: The Great Ones Remember...


	14. The Great Ones Remember

Samuel Owens picked up the telephone, and stared at it for a few seconds with tired eyes, and then, slowly, painstakingly, he began to dial, glancing down at the notes on his desk as he did so, wishing that he could be anywhere apart from this particular situation.  


Eventually, at the other end, somebody answered.  


“It’s me,” said Owens. “We need to talk.”  


*******

Lucas Sinclair paced around the edges of the school hall, and tried not to look at the ghosts that filled the room.  


He didn’t recognise most of them. There must have been twenty, maybe thirty – a small sample of the dead of Hawkins, from Starcourt and the Lab and everywhere else that people had died over the last however many years, all standing still and patient, dotted around the hall, as though they were waiting for something.  


In the middle of the hall stood the radio, still being assembled by Mike and Mr Clarke, as Max and Erica hovered around it, trying to be helpful. Lucas wasn’t entirely sure what the end goal was here, if he was being honest; Mike had picked up a mysterious secret message from somewhere, but this seemed more like another problem rather than a solution to any of their currently existing ones. There was a monster being allowed to run around Hawkins attacking people that had nearly killed him and Max, and a creature from the Upside-Down as well somewhere, and – on top of all of that – there were ghosts everywhere, silent, staring in silent judgement.  


Lucas looked away, and wondered if they had perhaps bitten off slightly more than they could chew this time.  


After ten minutes or so, there was a clattering in the hallway, and Lucas ran to the door to see whether this was a sign of their impending death, but it was only Robin and another girl with a thin face and long brown hair, walking calmly towards them.  


“Ah, brilliant,” said Robin, seeing him. “You guys are already here. What’s going on?”  


“Well,” said Lucas, wondering where to start, and then he shrugged. “Quite a lot of things. Why are you here?”  


“Robin said that we had to be,” said the other girl, in a quiet voice. “Some kind of time thing or something. Knowledge from the future.”  


“You’ve time-travelled?” said Lucas in surprise.  


Robin shook her head, but didn’t seem entirely sure. “Not really? But I think I might have left the universe for a bit, so I don’t know if that counts.”  


And then there was another figure behind them in the hallway, far more tangible and threatening than the ghosts, and Lucas exclaimed something wordless in shock, before the light fell onto the face of Nancy Wheeler, who was making her way purposefully towards them.  


“What the hell are you lot all doing here?” she said. “Wait – Robin – you’re alive –“  


She trailed off, and shook her head, and strode towards Robin, pulling her into a close embrace, and Robin blinked in confusion over Nancy’s shoulder at Lucas, before she was released.  


“Jasna,” said Nancy, turning to the other girl. “I’m sorry. You were right, you know.”  


“It’s fine,” said Jasna, her voice soft and guarded. “Did you – did you do what you wanted to?”  


Nancy looked away for a half-second, and then nodded. “It’s done. Well. The first part is, at least.”  


Eventually, after the confused greetings and failed attempts to explain things, the eight of them – Lucas and Max and Mike and Erica, Mr Clarke and Nancy and Robin and Jasna – came to stand in a circle in the centre of the hall, facing each other over the top of the radio.  


“Right,” said Mike (of course he would be the one to try and start this insane meeting off, thought Lucas fondly). “We’ve all had pretty crazy nights, by the sounds of it. Would anyone like to go first with an explanation?”  


Jasna put her hand up, and then turned scarlet when the other seven people there turned to look at her. “Sorry. Erm. So, I was drinking hot chocolate with Robin in the diner, when Nancy turned up, and told us that there were ghosts everywhere. So we went to a spooky house, where Heather Harrison –“  


“Holloway,” whispered Robin into Jasna’s ear, and the girl’s face turned somehow slightly redder, as she nodded quickly.  


“Heather Holloway,” Jasna continued, “showed up and made all of the rooms go weird and the staircase turn into the Greek myth about Sisyphus. And then Robin went through the door at the top, and disappeared, and then the house got destroyed somehow, and Nancy went home. And then Robin returned, and saved me from a massive monster that was about to eat me, and then – erm – then we came here. Through the forest.”  


Robin nodded. “Yep, that’s basically all accurate, although I probably wouldn’t have framed this in a Greek mythological context. But yeah, when I went through that door, I was trapped in this memory of mine, from back when me and Heather were friends. And eventually, I fought my way out of that, and talked to the ghosts. I think, somehow, all of them? At once? Is that possible?”  


Mike shrugged. “I don’t think Hawkins really plays by those rules any more. Possible, impossible, things like that. Two hours ago, we phoned Virginia, phoned Will, and it was past midday there. Then the sun rose here, six hours before it should have done.”  


“What the hell happened to your face?” said Nancy, and there was concern in her voice behind the surprise.  


Mike rolled his eyes. “Oh, god, why does everyone keep going on about the face?”  


“Maybe because you look like a rag doll that someone’s failed to repair,” suggested Max, and Lucas turned his laugh into a cough.  


“It’s no big deal,” insisted Mike. “I was out with the radio on Weathertop, and picked up a strange signal, and then I ran into Troy, who dragged me all the way to Starcourt and carved my face up with a switchblade, because he said that he could see James’s ghost. Then I filed a useless police report, met Mr Clarke –“ the science teacher waved nervously with one hand, as the other held an icepack against his bruised jaw – “went to Lucas’s, and then got beaten up again.”  


“It was Neil,” Lucas heard himself saying. “Hargrove. Max’s stepdad. He broke in, and knocked Mr Clarke out, and he’d probably have murdered me if Erica hadn’t shot him.”  


Erica did not smile, as he was expecting her to; did not bow or gloat or anything like that. She just stared, her eyes troubled, at nothing in particular.  


“And he had ghosts as well,” said Max. “What are they?”  


“I think I know,” said Nancy, her voice composed. “When I left, Jasna, I went home, because I’d – because I’d collected all the information that I’d needed. You see, I’d been seeing Barb’s ghost for a long time now, and I worked out a way to kill her.”  


“What?” said Mr Clarke. “You…killed a ghost?”  


“I told you it was like the film,” muttered Jasna to nobody in particular, and Robin laughed slightly, before looking around the circle and falling silent.  


“They’re not ghosts,” said Nancy. “They’re signals. Or, rather, the same signal.”  


“Wait,” said Mike. “A radio signal? Keeps saying the same words, over and over again?”  


“What do you mean?” said Robin.  


Mike, instead of saying anything, flicked a few switches on the radio before them, and a voice – clear and crisp, with barely a hint of static – filled the room.  


“ _Remember_ ,” it said, in a thousand voices and none. “ _Remember. Repeat. Remember. Remember. Repeat. Repeat…_ ”  


“The ghosts –“ said Max, in surprise, and Lucas spun to face them as well, and saw that their mouths were moving, as one, silently mouthing the same words that issued forth from the speaker.  


“Yeah,” said Nancy, and she sounded older now, somehow. “That signal. That’s what’s producing the ghosts. And if you block it out, then you can kill them.”  


“How can a radio signal make visible things?” said Jasna.  


“Oh,” said Mr Clarke, sounding almost surprised to have an answer for something. “That makes sense, actually, if we assume that the signal is modulating quite extensively and incredibly quickly. Radio waves, after all, are just one part of the electromagnetic spectrum as a whole, with visible light being another part of that.”  


Lucas nodded slowly. “Nancy. How did you block the signal out?”  


“I surrounded Barb with aluminium foil,” said Nancy. “Wrapped around plywood and chicken wire. I think the book called it a Faraday cage, but I made some modifications to the diagram there. It worked. It stopped the signal from getting through to where she’d been.”  


“You stole my chicken wire?” said Mike, sounding honestly offended.  


Nancy turned to face him, shooting him the kind of expression that only an older sibling could manage.  


“Never mind that,” said Erica. “Will it work again?”  


“Sure,” said Max, “if we can build a cage around all thirty of these ghosts here without them moving away. And then around all of the other ones in town. Including the ones hanging around with Neil, and Troy.”  


“It still wouldn’t work,” murmured Mike, as though he were working something out, and then nodded. “Yeah. It wouldn’t work. The signal’s stronger now, much stronger than it was earlier. There’s no static, no interference.”  


“What’s changed?” said Lucas. “It’s only been, what, a few hours? And the ghosts have been here for –”  


“Weeks,” said Mr Clarke, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “I kept seeing Bob, everywhere I went. I thought I was going mad.”  


“I think I know what’s different,” said Robin. “Heather, the ghosts – whatever – they told me that the way was being opened. That was how I could come back, I think. I don’t know what it means, but I’ve got this horrible feeling…”  


“Shit,” said Mike, and then rolled his eyes pre-emptively at Nancy. “The Gate. It’s opened again.”  


“No,” said Nancy. “It’s not just the one. I think – I think there’s more. Small ones, tiny ones, but everywhere in town. I saw them when I was driving here – didn’t realise what they might be – but there were holes, splits in the air or something like that. Places where the light didn’t shine properly.”  


“Well,” said Mike, his voice strangely controlled. “There’s one way to find out.”  


Mr Clarke opened the door to the classroom, and Lucas realised which room it was. This was where it had all ended, the first time round; where they had made what they thought was going to be their last stand, and where El had saved them and destroyed herself before their very eyes, blowing open a Gate into the Upside-Down.  


The others crowded into the room behind Lucas, and saw, with him, the great gaping hole in the back wall, and the world on the other side of it.  


“Yep,” said Max, somewhat superfluously. “That’s a Gate.”  


“You’ve never seen a Gate before,” said Mike, under his breath. “Just saying. Just pointing out.”  


“Oh, sorry, Wheeler,” said Max. “You’re right. There’s lots of things out there that look like portals into another dimension. I bow to your superior expertise.”  


Lucas regarded the two of them bickering, and noticed how different it sounded and felt when there was no anger or hostility behind the words.  


“But that wasn’t where I was,” said Robin, peering though the gap in the fabric of reality at the ash-filled darkness beyond. “I was somewhere else entirely. Memories at first, yes, but then somewhere…somewhere bright, and empty. Somewhere that I could see the whole of time, the whole of the world, just for a fragment of a second or something, and then I was back here in the real world.”  


“Of course,” said Mr Clarke, almost to himself. “It’s just like _Flatland_. Well –“  


“Wait,” said Lucas. “You understand this?”  


“Well, for a given value of ‘understand’…”  


“Can you explain it for us?” said Mike. “Come on, sir. Classic Mr Clarke explanation?”  


“Those painkillers of yours are going to wear off soon,” said Max. “And when they do, I’m not going to be upset, you know that?”  


Mike opened his mouth to say something in retort, but was cut off by Erica’s elbow, as Mr Clarke walked to the blackboard, and drew a single chalk line on it.  


“OK,” he said. “Here’s what I think might be happening here. This line – how many spatial dimensions does it have?”  


“One,” said Lucas, automatically. “Length, and that’s it.”  


Mr Clarke nodded approvingly. “Now, if I draw another line next to it, what do we get?”  


“Two lines,” said Erica.  


“Two one-dimensional things,” said Jasna, ignoring the younger girl. “Because they’re infinitely thin. Or they should be, at least. They still don’t have any width, even if you combine them.”  


“Absolutely,” said Mr Clarke, smiling, and turned to the blackboard again. “But, if I keep drawing them, an infinite number, all next to each other, then –“  


“Two dimensions,” said Max. “A square.”  


“And then if we stack an infinite number of squares on top of each other,” said Lucas, “a cube. Three dimensions.”  


“And then what?” said Mr Clarke.  


“Lots of cubes,” said Nancy. “All stacked on top of each other. No. Wait. Hang on…” She trailed off.  


Mr Clarke nodded. “Something that we can’t really imagine, that’s what. We can’t imagine where we’d put the cubes, just like someone who’d lived their whole life on a line couldn’t imagine how to get from that to a square. But, if we take an infinite number of three-dimensional objects, like cubes – or, indeed, like our entire universe – then we’d get something else. Something with four spatial dimensions – let’s ignore time for the moment, since that works a bit differently – and contains an infinite number of parallel worlds, all sitting in the same shape.”  


“Oh,” said Robin, very quietly. “I understand. I think. And the ghosts – they told me that they were a signal, coming through the Between. That’s what they called it, the Between. Maybe that’s what they meant.”  


“There’s gaps in this four-dimensional thing?” said Lucas. “Gaps between worlds?”  


“An infinite amount,” said Mr Clarke. “An infinite amount of empty space. Remind me to tell you about Hilbert’s Hotel at some point.”  


“Space for as many parallel worlds as you like,” said Mike, thoughtfully. “And for the ghosts, as well.”  


“So the signal’s coming from the Between?” said Jasna. “The ghost radio?”  


“No,” said Nancy, shaking her head. “Can’t be, if it’s empty. And, besides, this isn’t random. This is malice; this is an attack. This signal, these ghosts, showing up now – that can’t be anything good. It’s from in there.”  


She gestured to the Gate in the wall, which – and perhaps it was just Lucas’s imagination – looked slightly larger than it had done a few minutes earlier.  


“Why?” said Erica. “Why would the Mind Flayer send a radio signal through to Hawkins?”  


“I know why,” said Max, and it seemed that Mike had had the same thought as well, nodding emphatically as she spoke. “It’s psychological warfare.”  


“Back in the medieval era,” continued Mike, “when there were castles being besieged, the attackers would play music all night, and taunt them, and stuff like that. They wouldn’t let the defenders get any sleep, any rest.”  


“So that’s what these ghosts are,” said Nancy, and her face was very controlled. “A weapon.”  


“A living weapon,” said Robin. “They can talk to us, get us to relive our worst memories.”  


“But you got out,” said Jasna. “You told me. You got closure, and you managed to escape. And they helped you, told you part of all this.”  


“They’re made of our memories,” said Robin. “That’s what the signal means. If we can make peace with them, with the past, then the memories aren’t our enemies any more. If not…”  


“If not,” said Max, “you get Neil.”  


“And Troy,” said Mike.  


“And probably half the town,” said Lucas. “Nobody lets go of things here in Hawkins. Here in America. All of these traumas, these conflicts, they just echo, and they don’t stop echoing.”  


Erica nodded, and a silence fell over the classroom.  


“Unless we stop them first,” said Nancy.  


“How?” said Jasna.  


“Stop the cycle of violence and hatred?” said Nancy. “Stop the traumas, the pain, the memories of terrible things? No idea.”  


“But…”  


“But the signal,” said Nancy, and her face was fierce now, triumphant and fierce, “that, we can stop.”  


“And how do we go about doing that?” said Robin.  


“Simple plan,” said Nancy. “Very simple. We go into that hellscape, into the Upside-Down, and we find the source of the signal, and we blow it up.”  


*******

They did not have long to wait before the siege began.  


El did not notice it at first, startled by Maria’s frantic elbow in her side – for her mind had been somewhere else entirely, and she did not know where – but, as she jerked back into concentration, she heard the sounds, the low noise of something cutting through metal from just outside the door to the morgue.  


“It’s them,” said Maria, under her breath. “It’s the Vestige, isn’t it?”  


El nodded.  


“There’s nowhere to run,” continued Maria, her words coming faster and faster. “The others aren’t coming, not quickly enough. We’re trapped. There’s no way out of here.”  


“No,” said El, shaking her head.  


Maria stared at her in bafflement. “How are we supposed to escape, then?”  


El silently pointed up to the wall above the cupboards where the bodies were stored, at the vent right there, and Maria followed her finger, and then gasped in realisation, and leapt to her feet, and dashed over to the wall. El rose as well, slower, and joined her there, and stared at their one possible chance of escape, high and far and out of reach.  


“Come on,” said Maria, a new determination in her voice. “We just need to get the screws off, and then we can get inside.”  


“How do we reach it?” said El.  


Maria faltered for a moment, and then bit her lip uncomfortably. “Maybe…maybe if we get this cupboard open, then we can use the door as a kind of a step –“  


El nodded, and pulled sharply on the handle, and was not entirely prepared – even though, rationally, she had known what to expect – for what she saw inside it.  


There was a body, cold and motionless, half-clothed and staring sightlessly into the ceiling above. There was no clear cause of death, although the man had apparently not lived a tremendously safe and reclusive life, with scars and half-faded bruises covering his face and torso; but, for all that, his expression was calm, oddly peaceful.  


She stared at the body, feeling as though she were on the edge of some great realisation or some great despair, until Maria shook her by the shoulder.  


“Sorry,” said El, realising that the other girl had been talking. “What did you say?”  


“I asked if you could give me a hand up,” said Maria, but her brows were furrowed with concern. “Are you OK, El?”  


El nodded, but by the look on Maria’s face, she had not been entirely convincing. “I don’t know. Strange.”  


“Weirded out by the corpses?” said Maria, as El lifted her up onto the top of the door and held it still, so that she could get to work slowly unpicking the screws holding the vent in place with some sharpened metal tool she had found inside the cupboard.  


“Yes,” said El. “No. Sort of.”  


Maria said nothing, apparently inviting El to continue, so she did.  


“I don’t understand,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. That these people, they were all just walking around, doing normal things, and then something happened, and they weren’t there any more. Just the bodies, the physical things. Not the people.”  


“Yeah,” said Maria, quite quietly. “It’s weird. I know.”  


“And people act like it isn’t,” said El, as a screw fell to the floor beside her. “Like it’s perfectly ordinary. And they just keep going on with their lives, even though they know that it could happen to them, at any time. One day, everyone knows, they’ll just stop being a person, and turn into a body. How can they just keep going when they know that?”  


“Maybe they don’t,” said Maria, as she removed another screw, and began work on the third. “Maybe, you know, the realisation doesn’t really dawn on people. The implications. All of that.”  


“Maybe,” said El, staring at the body that lay before her. Outside the morgue, the sounds of the Vestige were becoming louder and louder. “Maybe. Otherwise, how could people kill people?”  


“Because they have to?” suggested Maria.  


“Not always,” said El. “Sometimes, it’s just…just about turning the person into a body, so that they can’t be in the way any more. Sometimes it’s for the wrong reasons. And sometimes it’s just completely pointless, a mistake, an accident, someone standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. People stop existing because of bad luck. Everything they are, all gone. And then everyone else just accepts this.”  


“Because they have to,” repeated Maria, a strange tone in her voice now. The third screw fell loose. “Because there’s nothing that they can do about it, no matter how terrible it is. We can’t undo it.”  


And El thought back on hundreds of dark and empty nights, remembered everything that had happened to her and to her friends and her family and everyone else, all of the darkness and the hurting and the traumas, and she said nothing, because Maria was right.  


“It’s OK,” said Maria, into the silence of the grey morgue. “It’s about moving on.”  


“Yes,” said El softly. “Moving on.”  


And the final screw fell loose, bouncing on the floor with a high metallic sound, and Maria hissed in triumph, and pulled herself up, into the ventilation shaft on the other side, and then awkwardly twisted round and leaned out of the opening, extending her hand downwards to El.  


“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”  


And then they were in the vents, crawling as fast as they could, for the Vestige would surely notice their escape route when they finally broke into the morgue. Perhaps they would have possessed somebody small enough to follow, someone who would chase them down and drag them back and absorb them into the hive mind that had once been a fragment of the Mind Flayer. Perhaps they would just fill the ventilation system with knockout gas, if there was enough of that in the hospital. Or perhaps they would just station sentries at each possible exit, because there could only be so many of them, and when they emerged, they would walk right into the trap.  


They kept crawling, despite these possibilities.  


And they were, somehow, a long way from El’s mind, because it kept drifting back to the subject of death. It was strange, for she hadn’t thought much about it before they had made it to the morgue, and yet now it seemed as though there was little else that she could concentrate upon – and, indeed, as though she had been dancing around the edges of this great and cavernous topic for a long time now without fully appreciating its magnitude or its importance.  


She wondered if Mike knew about this, or Will, or any of the others – or, no, whether they thought about the subject in this way, whether they had noticed what seemed to her to be the utter baffling incomprehensibility of the fact that people died. She suspected that they had, because her friends were all quite clever people, and moreover because they’d lived in the real world for a lot longer than she had.  


Or did this mean that they wouldn’t see it? Were they used to it, _habituated_ , like people that had grown up listening to a particular kind of music and so couldn’t imagine how anyone would dislike it, or like people who had always been told for their entire life that they existed purely to serve the _national interest_ with their special powers? They’d learnt at school, a few weeks ago, about a man called Plato who told a story about people living in a cave who never knew that there was an outside world, and El had understood it on a deep and familiar level; and now, she was beginning to wonder whether Mike and Will and Maria and Max and everyone else in the world had been living in their own cave, a cave where death was normal and understandable, and not something alien and incomprehensible and devouring.  


And then, all of a sudden, her train of thought was broken, for they rounded a corner, and the vents opened up before them into a much larger space, just as dimly lit and metallic, but towering far out of sight and lined with strange cables, and Maria whispered, “It’s the elevator shaft.”  


“Can we climb it?” said El.  


Maria shrugged. “We can try.”  


Cautiously, they made their way to the edge of the shaft, and looked up. There was a rudimentary ladder not too far from them on the wall, holes neatly cut into the metal, and several metres above them hung something dark and square, which El presumed must have been the elevator.  


Maria, very slowly, reached her hand out along the wall, extending her arm almost as far as it could reach, before it closed onto the edge of one of the holes, and she let out an audible gasp of relief, following it with her other hand, and clumsily swinging out into the open shaft onto the ladder. El followed, and did not even have to think about it, for her body seemed to be operating more or less on autopilot, whilst her brain fizzed and seethed like a tablet in a glass of water.  


It did not take long for them to climb to the bottom of the elevator, and Maria muttered something under her breath about another hatch, setting to work with her improvised screwdriver, and before too long, they were inside. A pale blue light suffused the inside of the elevator, coming from the ceiling and from the buttons, and the pair of them collapsed against the wall, breathing sighs of temporary relief.  


“Thank you,” said El to Maria, seriously. “For getting us out.”  


Maria grinned her normal, faintly nervous, smile. “No problem. Are you OK now?”  


El put her head to one side, and considered this. And then she realised that it was not just her imagination being overactive, supplying images of fizzing and crackling and tumult, but that she could genuinely hear these sounds, deep inside the back of her brain; and, moreover, she could taste a strange but faintly familiar kind of electric tang in the air, which Maria seemed not to have noticed.  


“Wait,” she said. “Let me try something.”  


Because it was familiar. All of this was familiar, like a dream from a long time ago slowly returning through the mists, like the shockwave of a distant explosion slowly washing over her and waking her up.  


She tried to move Maria’s screwdriver with her mind, and, unsurprisingly, it did not budge. But that was alright; that was what she had been expecting. That was not the main thing that she was thinking about now.  


El Hopper closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, and stepped into the Void.  


*******

White light, everywhere, as far as the eye could see. And then Nikolay blinked, and realised that ‘as far as the eye could see’ was precisely no distance whatsoever, because the notion of distance was meaningless when there were no objects to have a distance between.  


Slowly, he became aware that he was not alone. Kali was there, by his side, and very faintly, so was Terry; they faded into being next to him, and Nikolay wondered whether they were seeing him materialise at the same time, and which one was true.  


“The Between,” said Terry, her voice a whisper in a cathedral. “That’s what some people call it.”  


“Who?” said Kali, and Nikolay tried not to roll his eyes at the fact that they were in another dimension entirely, devoid of recognisable notions of space, and Kali was still busy trying to interrogate everyone she encountered.  


Terry shrugged. “I don’t really know who they are. But sometimes, when I’m here, then I can see them. See their memories.”  


“I don’t understand,” said Nikolay. “Wait. Sorry. I mean, obviously I don’t understand any of this place, this Between, but I definitely don’t get that last bit. How can people’s memories, from the real world, make it through to here?”  


Terry smiled slightly. “Nikolay, you’re asking entirely the wrong person here. I was an art major who worked in a cocktail bar to make money on the side, not a philosopher or a dimensional physicist. As best as I know, this is just kind of the place that memories go to, sometimes. Where the real world, and the dark world as well, and probably a lot of other ones that I’ve never seen, echo and bleed through the tiny little holes and gaps that exist.”  


Nikolay nodded slowly. “And you think that you can get us out of one of those gaps?”  


“And get us to Brenner?” added Kali. “And you seem to have survived this far – do you think you’d be able to come with us?”  


Terry shook her head, a serene expression on her face. “Kali, sweetheart, there’s no going back for me now. I wouldn’t even be able to go back to the dark world, let alone the light one. But I can help you find Brenner’s memories, I think, latch onto them and climb up them to the source, and then…”  


She did not need to say any more.  


“Here it is,” said Terry, eventually, and Nikolay had to strain to hear her, because her voice was fading faster and faster. Her hand was raised, as if she was grasping a branch a foot above her head, but he could not see anything in her grasp.  


“What is it?” said Kali.  


“Martin Brenner,” said Terry. “His life and memories. This should lead you straight to him.”  


Nikolay squinted at Terry’s hand, and thought that perhaps there was something there after all, only sporadically visible, like the edge of an impossibly thin knife in the air.  


“What do we do?” he said.  


“Take it,” said Terry. “Take it, and follow it. Try not to disturb the memories – I don’t know what will happen there, but it probably isn’t good. And then, get back out into the real world, and stop him from doing whatever he’s trying to do, and save my daughter.”  


“And what about you?” said Kali.  


“Me?” said Terry. “I’m fading already. Eventually, soon enough, I’ll become free-floating and untethered, and I’ll dissolve like a cloud. And then I’ll be at peace. Maybe I’ll see Andrew again, somewhere. Or maybe I’ll just sleep. I don’t know which one sounds more pleasant. Either would be fine.”  


“Terry –“ said Kali, but the fading woman held up her other hand.  


“Hush,” she said. “Do what you need to do. And, if you can, please do remember me. I’d be very grateful.”  


“Of course,” said Nikolay, and he reached up his hand to where hers was, and then he was gone.  


*******

“Jonathan,” whispered Will, as he felt the world stop turning beneath him with a jolt.  


The boy, the man, who sat there on that throne carved from rotten birchwood, said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes as he stared back at his brother, motionless.  


“How –“ Will began, but trailed off, for he had no idea what to say.  


“You know who we are,” said the Vestige, all around him, the same voice issuing from thirty different mouths. “You know who we take, Will Byers. We take the ones who are suffering and hurting, the ones who have been beaten down by life. We take the ones who have nobody there for them.”  


“He had me,” said Will, his voice quiet in the face of the crowd. “He had us.”  


“Perhaps you should tell that to what remains of him,” said the Vestige. “For whatever you gave him, it was not enough.”  


“I’m sorry,” whispered Jonathan again, the words forced through his mouth as though his face was resisting him. “Will, I’m sorry.”  


Will found himself taking a step forwards, and then another one, so that he was almost within arm’s reach of his brother.  


“Will,” said Josh, a warning in his voice, but Will ignored him.  


“How did they get you?” he said, softly. “Why didn’t we notice?”  


“Did you care enough?” said the Vestige.  


“Of course he fucking cared,” said Josh from behind him. “He’s fucking Will Byers, you _qehpebab_ , of course he cared. That’s what he does.”  


“And yet,” said the Vestige, and Will felt the words, felt the situation, like a hammer-blow to his chest.  


“My fault,” said Jonathan, just about. “Not yours. Run. Leave me.”  


“Not happening,” said Will, shaking his head.  


Jonathan blinked, and Will could see him biting his lip. “If you stay. Trouble.”  


“If we go…” said Will, something deep stirring within his mind, and then he took a deep breath, and turned to look at Josh over his shoulder, reaching out with his hand towards Jonathan as he did.  


“Will,” said Josh.  


“Josh,” said Will, “what’s the time?”  


Josh, his face utterly composed and unreadable, glanced down at his wristwatch. “Looks like it’s been just about four minutes…now.”  


And, right on cue, the car burst through the ceiling.  


_“Is everything prepared?” Josh had said, a little bit more than four minutes ago._  


_“Hang on a moment,” Will had replied, and had turned his back on the cave before him, and had walked away, several feet, to the car that rested incongruously on the forest floor before them._  


_It was not theirs, but – Will had suspected – the legal owner of the vehicle would probably not raise any complaint with the local police department, being as they were currently possessed by the Vestige. They had stepped out of that ditch, where they had been hiding, and had readied themselves to walk into the forests, to find the lair of the creature which had taken someone whom they had believed to be Josh’s father and give themselves up, and then Will had had a better idea._  


_Josh had been right. The ball was in their court now. And if the Vestige was waiting for them, was prepared to keep waiting for them to take the bait, then they might as well make preparations of their own._  


_So Will had tied a brick to a piece of string and suspended it from a strategically-placed piece of wood, and then had tied the other end of that piece of string to a loop of plastic on the back of the passenger seat of Mrs Malcolm’s battered old car. And then he had tied a second piece of string to the knot there, and had placed it cautiously across the back seat, and then he had taken the cigarette lighter from the glovebox, and had lit one end of the fuse, and Josh had started the clock._  


_And then they had gone underground, into the lair of the Vestige, and had bargained and threatened and all the rest of it, and as they were doing this, the fire had steadily crept along the fuse, and then it had reached the knot of string, and burned through it as well._  


_And_ then _the brick, no longer held in place by anything, had dropped, and fallen onto the accelerator of the still-running car, and it had shot forwards as fast as its engines would allow, straight into the rotten birch tree and through the fragile ceiling of the cave._  


Will grabbed Jonathan’s hand, and pulled with all his strength, and his brother pushed himself forwards to meet him, and they fell away from the throne, a fraction of a second before the car fell onto it and onto the Vestige.  


The figures, as one, began to advance, to close in on them, shock and fear and rage distinctly showing on their faces, but Josh was ready, for he pulled from his jacket a bottle of hairspray and the same cigarette lighter, and opened fire with some relish on the advancing horde. And as he did, Will lifted Jonathan’s arm over his shoulder, and felt his brother’s weight slump onto him, and he staggered towards Josh, towards the exit, towards survival.  


“Will?” said Jonathan, and perhaps it was just his imagination, but it seemed like there was a little bit more life in his tone now.  


“It’s OK,” whispered Will, with all of the breath that he could spare. “We’re getting you out of here.”  


And now they were at the exit, and Jonathan was slowly beginning to lift his weight away from Will and onto his own two legs more and more, and Josh finished one bottle of hairspray, and threw the empty canister contemptuously into the face of one of the soldiers of the Vestige, and produced another one, covering their retreat, as they began to back away along the tunnel that led to the outside world.  


And then the sun, the low afternoon sun, was shining on them, and the wind was fresh and liberating, and they were on the forest floor again, where they had stood slightly over four minutes ago. Will turned to Jonathan, and saw that there was something in his eyes which had not been there before – signs of life, of lifting despair – and his brother, shakily, pulled his arm off Will’s shoulders, and stood on his own two feet, gasping in the air. Behind them, just distant enough to stay out of range of Josh’s improvised flamethrower, the Vestige stood, rank upon rank of men and women with empty eyes; before them, the forest sloped away, down to the sea.  


“Run,” said Will, and they did.  


*******

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” said Mike, at her elbow, and Nancy jumped slightly. “Going into the Upside-Down. We can try and find another way.”  


She shrugged. “It’s no big deal. I’ve been there before.”  


“Yeah,” said Mike, “and you almost got eaten by the Demogorgon. Jonathan told us.”  


“Well,” she said, “this time, I guess I’ll try and pay more attention. And anyway, if this place is supposed to be swarming with Demogorgons, where are they? Why haven’t they come through this portal yet?”  


Mike scowled, but furrowed his eyebrows in thought.  


“There can’t be that many over there,” she continued. “It was only one that made it through the first time, after all, plus those dog things the second time. They can’t be common.”  


“Even so,” said Mike.  


She tilted her head in acknowledgement.  


“Nancy,” he said. “You know that it wasn’t your fault, right?”  


“What?”  


“Barb. You weren’t the one that killed her.”  


She said nothing for a moment, for she was half-tempted to ask how on earth he knew what had been going through her head for much of this present crisis, but knew as well that the answer would be rather obvious. He knew what she was thinking because he would think the same in her place.  


“I know,” she said, with a frustrated sigh. “Kind of. But that doesn’t change what happened, does it?”  


Mike nodded slightly.  


“The situation is, she’s dead,” Nancy continued. “And if we don’t do something now – if I don’t do this – then a lot more people will be.”  


And now they were standing by the great yawning hole in reality that filled the wall of the classroom, and staring into it.  


“We can’t all go,” said Nancy. “In fact, it’s probably best if most of us stay behind. The more of us there are in there, the slower we’ll be, the less chance we’ll get to have the element of surprise on our sides. And we need people to guard this end, in any case.”  


“Well, I’m coming with you, obviously,” said Robin.  


Nancy turned to look at the other girl, and noticed with some surprise that she looked as though she had changed greatly in the few hours since they had seen each other last, in the Holloway house. There, outside the front door, Robin had been brittle and scared, and then inside, she had been mournful and haunted and determined as she had thrown herself into darkness. But now something was different; she seemed, in a way, more complete, more accepting of things. Robin Buckley had gone through that dark door, and she had emerged again on the other side as someone stronger.  


“Works for me,” said Nancy, nodding. “I’d be glad to have you by my side.”  


Robin smiled slightly back at her.  


“Me too,” said Mike.  


“Nope,” said Nancy, immediately, and raised her voice over her brother’s protests. “Your face is literally a picture in a medical textbook at the moment. When the painkillers wear off, you’ll feel the whole thing hit you in one go. And, anyway, you know that the Demogorgons can detect blood from miles away.”  


Mike stared mutinously at her for a moment, and then nodded in acceptance.  


“We’ll stay as well, then,” said Max, gesturing to her and Lucas. “I mean, no offence, Wheeler, but if the people here need to stand guard, then you’re not going to be much good.”  


“You have been beaten up twice in one evening,” said Lucas, apologetically. “You’re basically our new Steve.”  


Mike shook his head in despair.  


“I can come as well,” said Jasna, quietly, as quietly as she said everything.  


Nancy looked at her in surprise. “Really? You want to do this?”  


“Not even slightly,” said Jasna, quirking her mouth into a slight smile. “But – well – it’s not like I’ve been very much help to any of you so far. I want to make a difference. I want to be brave.”  


“Jasna,” said Robin, looking her in the eye, “we’re not going to judge you for not doing this, you know. You don’t need to try and be brave for us.”  


Jasna held her gaze for around a second, before looking away awkwardly. “I know. But…”  


“It’s alright,” said Nancy, reassuringly. “Stay. Help the others. That’s just as useful as what we’re doing here. And we won’t think any less of you for staying.”  


Jasna bit her lip, and then nodded in a small motion. “Thank you. Both of you. I’m sorry that I can’t be of any more help –“  


“Hey, Konstanjević,” said Robin, smiling a crooked smile. “Try and apologise to me one more time for something unnecessary, and I’ll break your face.”  


Jasna opened her mouth as if to say something, and then closed it again, a red flush and an awkward smile spreading across her face.  


“Have we got the tanks?” said Nancy.  


Erica jerked her head towards the door, where Mr Clarke was slowly rolling two large blue metal barrels along the floor.  


“Those look heavy,” said Lucas. “Good luck carrying them.”  


“Hopefully it won’t be too far,” said Robin. “Otherwise I’m giving up and going home. You know, there’s commitment, and then there’s commitment.”  


Nancy, despite herself, let out a slight chuckle. “Shall we?”  


“No sense in hanging around here,” said Robin, smiling too.  


They lifted the metal barrels, and stepped through the portal.  


The darkness, on the other side, was almost a physical presence.  


Ash danced and fell in the sky like a blizzard, and occasional flashes of red lightning illuminated the sky, forking down from the heavy clouds above them and throwing eerie shadows across the ruins of the school. The ground was carpeted with something soft and wet and grey, like the body of a slug in the shape of vines and mosses, and strange brown fern-like tendrils covered the crumbling walls. Elsewhere, in the choking air, there were lights, dim red lights floating and pulsing like heartbeats, and Nancy thought that she could hear the faintest sounds of whispers coming from them if she listened hard enough. And there, silhouetted against the skyline, rose a crude and spindly tower, into the wild skies.  


They walked slowly towards it, carrying the heavy barrels, deathly aware of the volume of their footsteps in the empty streets, and Nancy noticed something out of the corner of her eye.  


“Robin,” she hissed. “You’re glowing.”  


Robin glanced down at herself, craning her neck to look past the blue tank. “Huh. Not again.”  


Nancy’s confusion must have showed on her face, for Robin hastened to clarify. “It was what I looked like when I came back, out of the memories. Made the monster run away, for some reason. Maybe that’s what’s keeping them away from us here.”  


“No complaints here, then,” said Nancy.  


They continued walking, slowly, awkwardly, down the street towards the tower, and all of a sudden, Nancy realised where it was located, and had to bite down on a dark laughter, for of course it would be there. Of course the tower that was sending these transmissions through the Between into Hawkins, sending ghosts and bad memories to plague the minds of the people of the town, would stand in the centre of the graveyard.  


“What was it like?” she asked, her voice soft in the darkness.  


“What do you mean?”  


“The memories. Heather’s world. What happened, there on the other side?”  


Robin was silent for a few moments, and Nancy began to wonder whether she had made a mistake in asking, before the other girl said, “Closure. I think. A little bit.”  


“Closure?”  


“Yeah,” said Robin. “Like I said, I sort of had some unfinished business with Heather, from back in the days when we were friends. And the memories kept trying to make me relive that day, that moment when things fell apart –“ she smiled ironically at her own words, although Nancy had no idea quite why – “but then, eventually, I broke through, I think. I talked to them, asked them what was happening, worked through my traumas as much as I could. And it feels like…” She trailed off.  


“It feels like what?” said Nancy, her voice as gentle as she could keep it, but curious.  


“I don’t know,” said Robin. “I guess it just feels like I can start to put all of that behind me now.”  


“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Nancy, before realising how that must have sounded. “Sorry. Not you. I’m glad that…whatever this thing was with you and Heather has been resolved now, that you’ve made peace with her. With the past. But I don’t understand why the Mind Flayer would have wanted that.”  


“I don’t think it was supposed to work like that,” said Robin, pensively. “The Mind Player sent this signal, telling us to remember our traumas and repeat them. It made ghosts from our memories. But, you see, those ghosts were only as hostile as our memories of the dead were, and if we could make peace with ourselves…”  


“You could neutralise the ghosts,” finished Nancy. “Yeah. That makes sense, I guess.”  


They were by the edge of the graveyard now, in the shadow of a tower built from a twisted and oddly amorphous parody of metal, which did not reflect the lightning bolts or the floating red orbs, but instead seemed to swallow the light. Nancy adjusted the barrel in her arms, grimacing at its weight, and carried it across the uneven grasping ground to the foot of the tower, where she lowered it gently to sit against the twisted metal leg. Robin followed, and dropped her barrel alongside it, and then took the candle from her inside pocket and propped it up beside the two great metal cylinders, lighting it on her fifth attempt.  


“What about you?” said Robin, as they moved warily away from the tower. “You and Barb? Did you get closure?”  


Nancy smiled a grim smile. “Not exactly. Not completely. I don’t think I’ll ever quite get there, if I’m being honest. The memories – well, the Mind Flayer chose to attack us that way for a reason, and I doubt that many people who saw the ghosts managed to overcome them, managed to make peace with their memories. I think you’re stronger than most people there.”  


The two girls looked at each other for a moment, and understanding passed between them.  


“Right,” said Nancy, breaking the moment at last. “We’d better get away from the tower now. As far as we can get.”  


“How far can you still hit the tanks from?” said Robin.  


“Won’t be a problem,” said Nancy. “I’ve done my practice. Just get ready to run when the explosion goes down.”  


“Oh, believe me,” said Robin, with a perfectly straight face, as they backed away to the edges of the graveyard, “I’ve been ready to run for quite a while now.”  


Nancy laughed slightly, and then drew her gun, levelling it towards the barrels filled with pressurised butane gas, and the dim flickering candle besides them, at the foot of the Mind Flayer’s great siege weapon of a radio tower.  


“Ready?” she said to Robin.  


“Ready,” said the other girl.  


Nancy pulled the trigger, and the world turned to fire.  


*******

Steve Harrington stood at ground zero of the explosion that had shattered the walls of the universe beyond repair, and stared mutely into the world beyond.  


“It’s back,” he said, trancelike, not addressing his words to anyone in particular; and then there was a great crashing sound behind him, and he jumped in startled fright, to see a large chunk of rock lying behind them, on the platform which overlooked what had once been Waxham’s laboratory.  


“Steve,” said Dustin, and there was a note of something that Steve could not quite identify in his voice.  


Steve turned to look at the younger boy, who was standing and wincing with slight pain from the fight, and saw that there was nobody else standing there. “Where’s Waxham?”  


“He ran,” said Dustin, but his voice was calm, deathly calm, in stark contrast to his wide eyes, and – without knowing quite why – a shiver of apprehension ran up Steve’s spine.  


“What is it?” said Steve. “Why are you looking at me like that?”  


“Steve,” said Dustin. “I want you to stay completely calm. Everything’s going to be fine. But I think you’ve been shot.”  


Steve screwed up his face in confusion. “What? I haven’t –“  


“Steve,” said Dustin, “look at your left arm.”  


Slowly, Steve glanced down at himself, and what he saw seemed to make very little sense to his conscious and rational mind. His sleeve was soaked with blood, almost dripping, and there was a gaping hole in his forearm, slightly north of his elbow; and yet he felt no pain, no discomfort, nothing.  


“But…” he began, and realised that he had no way of knowing how he was going to end the sentence. And then there was another crashing sound, and this time he saw it, saw a great piece of the ceiling tear itself loose from its foundations and crash into the floor below, blocking off the corridor which led to the ruins of the mall, and his chest was suddenly feeling tighter and tighter, his heartbeat pounding quicker and quicker.  


“You’re going into shock,” said Dustin, in what was possibly intended to be a reassuring voice. “It’s alright. It’s not that serious.”  


“Not that serious?” said Steve, louder than he needed to. “I’ve been fucking shot in the fucking arm, Henderson, and one of our three spies just killed another one and tried to kill us too, and the ceiling’s collapsing –“  


Dustin nodded, and grabbed Steve by the right arm, and pulled him towards the steps up to the platform, towards the tunnel that went to the Lab, and suddenly, Steve felt his legs give way beneath him, and he slumped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.  


“Steve,” said Dustin, and there was urgency in his tone now. “Steve, you need to get up.”  


“Can’t,” said Steve, for his legs seemed to have lost most of their feeling as well, as though the nerves had gone on strike; this was not mirrored by the rest of his body, where the pain of Waxham’s blows was slowly beginning to fade into his awareness.  


Dustin was breathing louder and louder, but visibly trying to stay calm, as he let go of Steve’s arm and ran up the steps, and stared at the tunnel through to the Lab with a sort of mute horror.  


“What?” said Steve, from the floor.  


“It’s collapsed,” said Dustin. “There’s no way out. Shit. OK. OK.”  


Steve could hear the panic in Dustin’s voice, but it sounded like it was coming from a long way away somehow, as though the younger boy was speaking from one end of a long passageway and he was at the other. The red light from what had once been the wall between the real world and the Upside-Down was bright now, painfully bright, so Steve allowed his eyes to fall shut.  


And then they sprang open again as something cold washed over his face, and – to his dull surprise – he was somewhere else in the room now, lying in the stream that ran across the room, with Dustin standing over him.  


“The fuck?” said Steve, through slightly numb lips.  


“Steve,” said Dustin, “don’t fucking do that again.”  


“Do what?”  


“You just passed out for a minute or two,” said Dustin, and now that Steve’s eyes had adjusted again to the light, he could see the tracks of tears on the other boy’s face. “I thought you were dead; I thought –“  


Steve tried to pull himself to his feet, and got halfway there, before he collapsed onto his wounded arm again. The blood was mixing with the stream now, a pale and lifeless red that flowed away from him.  


“We need to get out of this place,” said Steve.  


Dustin, despite the severity of the situation, cast him a withering look. “Yeah, no shit, Steve.”  


“Through the portal?” said Steve, raising himself up again and forcing himself to look into the red light at the skyless ash-filled darkness, the familiar-looking tunnel, that lay beyond it.  


Dustin shook his head emphatically. “You’re bleeding. A lot. The Demogorgons will find us in minutes.”  


“Then what?” said Steve, and all of a sudden – not gradually, like the rest of the pain had been, but in the space of a moment – his conscious mind finally registered the signals that had been coming from his arm, and it stabbed and burned with a horrible coruscating pain that went down through the muscle to the bone, and he let out an involuntary noise that was halfway between a gasp and a scream. Dustin caught him before he could fall, but the pain was still there, was deepening, was not going away –  


“Only one other way out,” said Dustin, and there was fear in his voice beneath the confidence and sympathy. “Every stream has to go somewhere.”  


He pointed with the arm that was not supporting Steve, into the far corners of the collapsing chamber, and Steve saw the fragment of deeper darkness within the shadows, a gap in the wall.  


“No,” he whispered, but rose to his shaky feet nonetheless, trying as hard as he could to push the pain away for as long as possible.  


“We can do it,” muttered Dustin, as they hobbled, together, towards it, as all around them, the walls began to crumble. “We can get out. We can escape.”  


And they plunged into the shadows, the two of them, dark water flowing at their feet and dying red light at their backs, and then there was nothing, nothing but the two of them, in the darkness.  


*******

The first attack came quicker than they had expected.  


It started with a low, eerie, rumbling sound, which echoed and reverberated through the walls and floors of the hospital building, shuddering the lights and rattling the doors in their hinges. And then, before the confusion had entirely worn off in their little war room, there was the sound of an explosion from somewhere close.  


Joyce ran, along with most of the others, out into the lobby, where the noise had been coming from, and she saw its source. There, down at the end of the long corridor, a group of people in assorted uniforms – soldiers, cleaners, secretaries – were slowly and calmly advancing towards them, at a casual walking pace, each of them with their heads tilted slightly to one side.  


She did not understand the stunned silence at first – why wasn’t anyone doing anything about this? – until she turned to look at them, and saw that the staff members there were all staring back at her, fear in their eyes, waiting for orders.  


“Everyone with a weapon,” said Joyce, keeping her voice as calm as she could given the circumstances, “fire on the people advancing. The Vestige has taken control of them, and it’s likely that nothing remains. Stop them, however you can.”  


And, as the sparse gunfire began, led by Axel and Funshine, she stood and watched, with a strange sense of disconnection from the whole scene, feeling rather as though she should be somewhere else entirely. She was not a commander, not a fighter; this was not her world.  


But, she thought to herself (as all around her, the bullets flew and the Vestige continued to advance), she did not have anything like a world any more. It had been destroyed many times in the past several years, reducing any stable periods to nothing more than ceasefires; her world had been shattered in Starcourt, and in the Lab, and on the day that Will was taken, and on the day that Lonnie finally left, and on the day that he arrived as well. There had never been a golden age. There had never even really been such a thing as a normal life.  


So…  


“Give me that,” she said to one of the hospital staff behind her, a young man with a smart suit and a trembling hand, and took the pistol from him, and fired with unerring aim into the ranks of the Vestige, again and again, and finally, the last body no more than twenty feet from the lobby, the advancing forces were no more.  


The hospital staff – no more than fifteen of them, including Joyce and Funshine and Axel – did not cheer or celebrate, but instead let out what sounded like a communal sigh of relief; some began to back away from the scene, back towards the communications room.  


“Gentlemen,” said Funshine, his deep voice calm and relaxed, but with steel beneath it, “the danger most certainly hasn’t passed yet. I don’t know where you think you’re going.”  


“No,” said Vaudrais, emerging from the communications room, and her face, once so composed, was white with shock now. “It hasn’t. They tricked us.”  


“What?” said Joyce, looking frantically towards the bodies, for fear that they might stand up again and resume their advance.  


“It was a distraction,” said Vaudrais, her voice oddly flat. “The explosion in the stairwell, the attack. They wanted us to look at that, and we did.”  


“What were they concealing?” said Axel, the manic tone fading from his voice and being replaced with a calm seriousness.  


“All of the cameras are down,” said Vaudrais, “and so are the firebreaks, the doors that we were containing them with. And they’ve broken into the weapon stores.”  


“Shit,” whispered Joyce, and froze for a moment, and then realised that inaction was not an option here. “So, they’re going to attack again soon. With weapons this time.”  


“Almost certainly,” said Funshine.  


“How many ways up are there?” said Axel.  


“Just the stairwell,” said the computer man, Lingwood. “The elevators have been down since the start. Unless…”  


He trailed off, and Joyce could see on Lingwood’s face that the explanation would not be a happy one.  


“Unless,” finished Vaudrais, “they’re going through the emergency exits. Tunnels, secret ways out, that emerge a few hundred metres from the base.”  


“If they get out through those,” said Joyce, seeing the scene with a horrifying clarity, “if they join up with the ones in town, they’ll have the numbers to take the whole of Winterton, to convert them or kill them.”  


“How many tunnels?” said Funshine.  


“Two accessible ones,” said Lingwood. “One emerging at the end of the driveway, the other to the water tower on the hospital grounds.”  


“We’ll take care of them,” said Axel, gesturing to himself and Funshine. “One each. The rest of you need to stop them from getting up here.”  


“And, if you can,” said Funshine, “to rescue Miss Jane and her friend. They can’t hide in the morgue forever.”  


“They’re not there any more anyway,” said Vaudrais. “They escaped, and just in time too. Goodness knows where they are now.”  


“We’ll find them,” said Joyce, to herself as much as anyone else. “We’ll save them.”  


Vaudrais said nothing.  


Joyce turned to the two men from Chicago, these strange warriors who had swooped in to save her children at the last minute the previous evening, and who she was now fighting side-by-side with. “You two. Are you sure you can cover the tunnels by yourselves?”  


“Not our first rodeo,” said Axel, with a crooked smile.  


“We’ll stop them,” said Funshine, looking straight at her. “We promise.”  


“Thank you,” said Joyce, softly.  


“It’s our honour,” said Funshine. “For the children.”  


“And,” said Axel, grinning a bit wider now, “for the chance to be crazy heroes.”  


“That too,” said Funshine, with a faint smile.  


And then they were gone, the two of them, hefting their weapons and striding out through the doors into the afternoon sun, and Joyce turned back to the situation at hand.  


Twelve soldiers, including her. Two young girls trapped somewhere unknown behind enemy lines, lost and afraid. Beneath them, in the underground labyrinths of the hospital, an unclear but presumably large number of the possessed, the Vestige directing their actions as though they were individual limbs of its body. Perhaps its focus on each one would be poor, considering their numbers; but then, it did not need its soldiers to do anything particularly complicated, merely to walk forwards and shoot at the defenders.  


“Defences,” said Joyce, and strode back out into the heart of the lobby. “You, you –“ she pointed at two random hospital administrators – “turn that desk on its side, and put it in the corridor. That’ll give us some protection. You, Lingwood, go and get us more weapons, whatever you’ve got on this floor. Literally anything that can be used as a weapon, get it. Everyone else, get ready. They’ll be attacking again soon, no doubt.”  


The men saluted, and ran to carry out her orders, and Joyce turned to Vaudrais. The doctor was watching her with a strange expression, almost confused.  


“We don’t have a chance,” said Vaudrais. “You know that, don’t you, Mrs Byers?”  


“We can do this,” said Joyce. “We can stop them getting out, I’m positive.”  


“We can’t,” repeated Vaudrais. “There must be hundreds of them. There’s twelve of us. And there’s no reinforcements on their way any time soon.”  


“Really?” said Joyce, and she could not keep the anger out of her voice any longer. “So how do you see this situation ending, then, Dr Vaudrais?”  


“They kill us,” said Vaudrais. “They break out of the hospital, and convert the town. They start trying to march on other towns, or to send roots across the country, spreading. Eventually, the armed forces will be called in. They’ll airstrike Winterton, or possibly use a nuclear weapon, if the situation looks bad enough by then. Then they’ll spend the next year or two hunting these things down, if they’ve managed to get out of the town. It won’t win, but nor will we.”  


“No,” said Joyce. “That’s not going to happen.”  


“Oh, really?” said Vaudrais.  


“Yes,” said Joyce, through clenched teeth. “Really. Because, Doctor, I don’t care if you think that this mess of yours can’t be stopped. We can try, and we’re going to try, until the Vestige kills us. Because I do not give up on my children.”  


*******

“You realise, of course, that this changes matters quite considerably,” said Jack Beeching into a telephone. His voice was calm, despite the news, and so was he. It was fine. It was all fine. He could handle this.  


The voice on the other end of the line said something, and Beeching allowed himself to smile.  


“Oh, that won’t be a problem at all,” he said. “We’ve been ready for something like this, you know.”  


The other person replied, and he half-listened, thinking as he did about the other operations in progress. The recent visitor from Hong Kong had been given his task, and had accepted with great alacrity; and although the convoy taking Entity Orpheus to Washington had suffered some unclear setback, the tape of the interrogation was still very much in play. He had a good hand, regardless of the recent news.  


“Don’t you worry about it,” he said in response to a question, smirking slightly in the full knowledge that it could not be seen over the telephone. “I know exactly how we should play this.”  


The whole thing could still work, if he was smart.  


*******

She was in a hospital, an old one, and a woman was giving birth.  


The whole scene had a distant, faded quality to it, the colours washed out and pale, and the screams of the woman did not sound all too sharp to her ears. And then there was a change in the noise, and the midwife was holding something small and covered in blood and fluid like a trophy (and Kali looked away at this point, because she had seen and done a lot of things which many people would not have been able to handle, but this was different), and when she looked back, the scene had changed, and the woman was tucked up under a blanket, and holding the child in the dim electric light.  


“Did you have a name in mind?” said someone out of sight, and the woman smiled wanly.  


“Martin,” she said. “After his grandfather. Martin Alexander Brenner.”  


The scene shifted, and they were outside the gates of a church, standing by the edge of the potholed road, and there was a child there, maybe ten or eleven.  


“Martin,” said someone rushing over to him, his mother from before, “there you are. We need to get home immediately.”  


“Is it true?” said the young boy, and a shiver ran through Kali, because the voice was nothing like the one from her childhood, and yet the faintest echo remained, beneath the surface, the smallest hint of the boy that he would grow into. “Mama, is it true about the Japanese?”  


The woman sighed. “It’s true, Martin. They attacked Pearl Harbor, early this morning. That was where they almost stationed your father, you know. It could have been him.”  


“Are we going to war now, Mama?”  


“Yes,” the woman said, very simply. “Yes, I think we are.”  


The scene shifted, and the boy was older, an awkward height, as he turned the dials on the radio, and sat down beside his mother to listen to the speech, to the crackling words describing how a Japanese city had been completely and utterly obliterated by a new and terrifying weapon. And, when the speech was finished, there was a pause, a stunned silence, and then the pair of them began to cheer, to jump for joy and hug one another triumphantly.  


“Maybe this is where it began,” said Nikolay, and Kali jumped slightly, because she had not realised that he was standing next to her in the memory until that moment. “Where Martin Brenner began. The news that science could win wars, could end the national struggle; I wouldn’t be surprised if this stayed with him.”  


Kali shook her head. “No. People don’t have a point at which they begin. They develop, bit by bit. They don’t have some kind of supervillain-style origin story. They choose, and they keep choosing, every day.”  


Before them, in the pale light of a faded living-room, the boy was still celebrating.  


The scene shifted.  


Now he was fully grown, taller than Nikolay and filled with a nervous confidence as he adjusted his tie, and stepped through the door.  


“Good afternoon, Mr Brenner,” said a man without a face, beneath a portrait of Eisenhower. Kali wondered if Brenner had never taken too much trouble to remember this man; and then she realised that there was no conceivable way that Brenner could have remembered his own birth, and gave up on trying to make some logical sense of this place.  


“Good afternoon, sir,” said Brenner, still standing. His voice was much closer, now, to how it would be in Kali’s memories, but not quite there yet. “It’s an honour to be here today.”  


The faceless man shook his head dismissively. “Please. Have a seat.”  


Brenner sat.  


“So,” said the faceless man, “you’ve got quite the impressive school record here, Mr Brenner. Some excellent scores in the sciences, I see, and – what’s this – class president. Very impressive indeed. Your name was brought to our attention as someone who could be of use to the national interest here, someone both skilled and patriotic, and we’d like to formally extend you an offer of a job – just as an assistant at first, but with a significant chance of advancement – here at the Palling Institute for Strategic Scientific Development. It would mean working in Washington for the first six months, and then you’ll be posted to one of our regional laboratories. You’ll be working on highly classified projects, you understand – projects which will help us to fight off the communist menace to America – and you will not be permitted to share the details of your works with anyone. But, if that’s acceptable to you, then we’d be delighted to have you on board, son.”  


“Senator McCarthy,” said Brenner, “I would be honoured to have this chance to serve my country.”  


The scene shifted.  


“Fuck you,” hissed the faceless man, McCarthy, his voice older and slightly more frantic, as they stood in a different office. “Fuck you, Martin, you snake. Jumping ship to the army, abandoning my faction like that.”  


“Senator,” said Brenner, young and handsome, with his voice calm and controlled, “I did what I had to do. The Palling Institute is finished; you’re a busted flush.”  


“I get it,” sneered McCarthy, “you’ve been bought out. What did they promise you in the army, your own laboratory? A chance to shake hands with Khrushchev himself?”  


“You see,” said Brenner, supremely assured, “this is why you fell, Senator. You haven’t understood how the game really works. You think that everyone opposing you is in league with Moscow, when the truth is, they’re just in league with whoever’s most convenient at the time in the government. You lack nuance.”  


Brenner turned his back on McCarthy, and began to walk away, but then apparently thought better of it, and turned his head. “And, for your information, I’ve never been a socialist, never been a Bolshevik spy. I dream of a world of exceptional people, all serving the United States, for the glory and defence of the nation; and I dream of pushing the boundaries of science itself, all in the name of America. And, believe me, now that I’m not shackled to your millstone, Senator, I’m one step closer to that.”  


The scene shifted.  


“Heard the news yet?” said someone out of sight. “From Dallas?”  


Brenner, staring intently down at a notepad covered in equations, shook his head.  


“It’s the President,” said the person. “President Kennedy. He’s been shot.”  


Brenner did look up at this, but did not seem too perturbed. “Really? Who by?”  


“Some guy called Oswald,” supplied the person. “Lee Harvey Oswald.”  


“You know what I mean,” said Brenner, impatiently. “Whose faction?”  


“No idea,” came the reply. “Definitely not the Russians, and probably none of the powers that be here in the States either. Best as I can tell, he’s just an ordinary lunatic who got lucky.”  


Brenner was staring into space.  


“What is it?” said the person.  


“Just thinking,” said Brenner. “The most powerful man in the country, or so everyone thinks. And one man could just get lucky. Just shoot him from out of the blue.”  


“There’s never going to be a way of stopping things like this,” said the person. “Not unless you can see inside people’s heads, or catch a bullet in midair, or some other superhero crap like that.”  


“Maybe,” said Brenner, neutrally, as though his mind was somewhere else.  


“We’re reassigning you,” said a difference voice, in a different place. They stood in an elegant wood-panelled office now, the American flag draped across one wall, and a man in a suit with no discernible features was sitting at a mahogany desk, Brenner on the other side. His face was still relatively young, Kali noticed, but the hair was beginning to grey ever so slightly.  


“To where?” said Brenner, sounding faintly indignant.  


“Somewhere that you won’t have heard of before,” said the man in the suit. “You know how it goes, Martin. You’ve spent enough time playing the game to see how it works.”  


“I have indeed,” said Brenner. “We’re joining forces with some other faction, I presume, and you’re sending me out of town as a peace offering to them.”  


“Not quite,” said the man in the suit. “We’ve negotiated something of an alliance against Sovereign, yes, with the group associated with the Department of Energy. But we’re not trying to get you out of our hair, Martin. Quite the opposite. There’s a new project opening up, a new front, and we’d like you to run it.”  


There was a moment of silence in the room – Nikolay, at least, seemed fascinated to find out what this new front would be, even if Kali couldn’t care less about any of this – and then Brenner smiled, and she remembered that smile very well from the days of her childhood.  


“Sir,” said Brenner, “I’d be honoured. What do you want me to do?”  


“The project has been given the codename of MK Ultra,” said the man in the suit, and a shiver ran through Kali’s entire body at those words. “The details are all in the folder here, but in short, we’re wanting you to conduct investigations into human psychic abilities. I believe that you’ve done some speculative work on this before, and we think that you’re the perfect person for the job.”  


“I’m flattered,” said Brenner, his eyes gleaming behind a neutral expression. “And this work – will it lead to –“  


“The production of humans with psychic abilities?” said the man, with a chuckle. “Yes, I’ve read your reports, Martin, and your enthusiasm for the project is heartening indeed. And yes, this is one of the main objectives of the project.”  


“Might I ask what resources are available to me?” said Brenner.  


The man in the suit shrugged. “This laboratory – town called Hawkins, up in Indiana – isn’t massive, and the budget’s a bit stretched at the moment. Enough for maybe ten, maybe fifteen, subjects at first, once you’ve identified suitable individuals. Let’s say twelve.”  


“Twelve will be perfect,” said Brenner, with a smile, and he picked up the folder.  


The scene shifted.  


It was familiar, cuttingly familiar, this time. Those doors and corridors, the flickering lights, the enclosing concrete walls – Hawkins National Laboratory was not the sort of place that many people would have called ‘distinctive’ in its looks, but then, most people had not grown up there, had not spent years upon years being tortured in those halls.  


“Well,” said a woman’s voice, which Kali remembered too, “that should be the Terry Ives situation taken care of, at last. Just one more – the Adienza girl – and then that’s our class.”  


“Subject Twelve should not be a problem,” said Brenner, absently, and then he turned to face the woman. “Miss Frazier. Do you understand the magnitude of what we are doing here?”  


“Please,” said Connie Frazier, “do tell, Dr Brenner.”  


“We are doing three things,” said Brenner. “Firstly, and perhaps of the most immediate importance, we are protecting our country, protecting the United States. The subjects we produce here, the experiments which we shall conduct, they will have immediate applications for our soldiers overseas in Vietnam and in Cambodia and in Latin America and Africa. These subjects may shorten the wars by months, years, bringing us a sharp and bloodless victory in whatever conflict arises. We will be able to gather intelligence on the actions of the Soviet Union without risking the lives of spies, and to counter their every move; and, perhaps, before too long, we will be able to use the abilities of the subjects on the battlefield itself.”  


“That’s one,” said Connie.  


“Secondly,” Brenner continued, “we are claiming a new frontier in the scientific world. You saw the footage from the Moon landings, I don’t doubt – well, what we are doing here and now in this tiny corner of Indiana is every bit as revolutionary as that. If the moon landings were the triumph of American engineers, then our project will be the triumph of the American biologists and psychologists and researchers into what is so speciously referred to as the paranormal.”  


“And third?” said Connie, sounding faintly bored.  


“Thirdly,” said Brenner, “we are bringing progress. We are bringing the future. One day, perhaps not very far from now, the thing that we know as the human race will be as obsolete as the spinning wheel or the musket. And in their place will be something new and wondrous.”  


He smiled the smile of a visionary.  


“Oh, you pretty things,” he whispered.  


The scene shifted.  


The scene shifted.  


The scene shifted, and Kali could not take it any more.  


For there, before her, stood the man who had tortured her from the ages of five through to sixteen, and she had no choice but to watch it all again – the electric shocks, the vivisections, the neglect and coldness. And this time around, she could see what she had not seen before, because she had been too busy suffering; now, from this vantage point, she could see the torturer in full.  


And he was enjoying it. Martin Brenner was enjoying himself, more and more, as the years flew by; where once there had been only clinical detachment, now there was zeal and passion and an utterly unshakeable belief in the fundamental goodness of his work. Kali watched as he tortured twelve young children, their numbers slowly dropping from different kinds of death, and she saw the certainty in his eyes only growing stronger that this was the right thing to do.  


And there was nothing else to be done but watch, powerless, as history unfolded before her eyes.  


*******

The sun had set and risen again by the time that the two girls returned.  


Max was the first to notice them, distant approaching silhouettes through the thick fog, and she called for the others. And soon, they were all together again, the eight of them crammed into that classroom, all talking frantically at one another, until Nancy clapped several times for attention, and said, “Did it work?”  


Lucas, who had been out in the main hall, nodded. “They’ve gone. The ghosts just faded away.”  


Robin let out an audible sigh of relief. Her face, like Nancy’s, was stained with ash and soot, and her eyes were red with exhaustion. On the other hand, thought Max, this last thing was probably true of all of them; it had been a long time since any of them had last slept, with the exception of Mike and Mr Clarke, and she was not sure that trauma-induced unconsciousness really counted in their cases.  


“What happened?” said Jasna, who was alternating between staring intently at Robin and glancing awkwardly around the room.  


“Not that much,” said Nancy, frowning. “We went in there, found the tower that was sending out the signal –“  


“Weathertop?” interjected Mike. His voice was quieter now, and Max assumed that the latest set of painkillers was wearing off; she wondered whether they would be able to find any more on the school premises.  


Nancy squinted at him in confusion, but Robin shook her head. “Nope. The graveyard, three blocks away.”  


Mike slowly nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense. That fits.”  


“Anyway,” said Nancy, “we blew it up, with the gas tanks. Just like we planned.”  


“Like in Jaws,” said Robin, unnecessarily, and then shrugged when everyone else turned to her, and mimed an explosion with her hands. Max shook her head quietly, realising that she had once thought that Robin was cool.  


“And then?” said Mr Clarke.  


“Then we came back,” said Nancy. “Pretty straightforward, really.”  


Max and Lucas exchanged an uneasy glance, and she saw the others doing the same.  


“Nancy,” she said, “you were gone for a few hours. We were going to come and rescue you if you took much longer.”  


“What?” said Nancy. “No, we weren’t – it couldn’t have been any more than fifteen minutes –“  


She looked to Robin for confirmation, but the other girl’s eyebrows were furrowed, as if she was trying to work something out.  


“Time dilation,” she said. “Like you guys mentioned earlier, between here and Winterton. Right?”  


Lucas nodded. “Must be. But there’s more –“  


“Everything’s gone crazy here as well,” said Erica, cutting in. “The clocks said that it was mid-morning when you left. Then the sun set not long after that; we saw it through the window.”  


“And then it rose again,” said Jasna, almost apologetically. “Maybe twenty minutes ago. But the clocks don’t match that; they say that it’s seven in the evening. Which doesn’t fit with our experiences either. Or yours.”  


Nancy was slowly shaking her head. “But that’s – that’s not possible –“  


“No,” said Mr Clarke, and there was a stark incomprehension in his voice. “None of this is. And yet here we are.”  


“There’s got to be some explanation,” said Max, mostly addressing the teacher.  


Mr Clarke just shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t find one. Not a scientific one, anyway. Time dilation is uniform, measurable, consistent. The timeline of somewhere close to an object of great mass is slowed due to the warping of spacetime by its gravity. Or something moving close to the speed of light experiences slower time as well from its internal reference frame. But that’s the only way it can go. It doesn’t make time go slower and then faster, make Hawkins stay several hours behind Winterton overnight and then rush through days in a matter of hours. It doesn’t mess with clocks, or with people’s experiences when they’ve gone out of sight.”  


“The portal,” said Max, realising. “When we saw them coming back, they weren’t slow-motion or anything. It looked normal.”  


Mr Clarke nodded in agreement. “I don’t know what’s happening here. I know less than any of you, I think. But this isn’t a scientific universe that we’re in any longer, I’m afraid.”  


“It’s the Upside-Down,” said Mike. “It’s got to be. Or the Between. It’s leaking out into Hawkins, destroying our reality.”  


Lucas nodded beside him. “I bet that the rest of the town is experiencing this as well. Probably differently, in their own timeframes. The number of different Gates, and the ghosts – it’ll be chaos.”  


“They must be seeing the same sun,” said Jasna, softly. “I mean, I presume. Otherwise, that would mean that we’d be able to drive from one place to another, and see the sun jump to a different position, forwards or backwards. It hasn’t done that yet, just moved pretty quickly.”  


“But it’ll be going at a normal speed for some people,” said Robin, evidently thinking it through aloud, “and too fast for some, and too slow for others.”  


“More psychological warfare,” suggested Erica, and Max, deep down, knew that this must be right.  


“Speaking of which,” said Mike, “you said that nothing else happened to you in the Upside-Down? No Demogorgons, no Mind Flayer?”  


“Nothing,” agreed Nancy, but frowned again as she did so.  


“My magic divine light would have kept them from attacking us, if they got too close,” said Robin, “but we didn’t see anything at all. Nothing even tried to stop us from destroying the tower.”  


“And definitely not the Mind Flayer,” said Nancy. “I remember the descriptions. Tall, towering, made of smoke and shadow. We couldn’t have missed it.”  


The room fell silent, as everyone glanced at one another, nervously, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question, and finally, Erica took the bait.  


“So,” she said, her voice stripped of all its normal confidence, “where is it?”  


*******

The car skidded to a stop, and the body of Jim Hopper stepped out of it, despite all efforts to the contrary.  


The afternoon sun was shining quite pleasantly over the town, over the houses and the fields and the ocean, and it shone a little brighter as the Mind Flayer placed its stolen feet onto the soil of Winterton for the first time, and stared at the building in the distance, at the other end of a long and elegant gated driveway. The sign to the side said _Broomfield Hill Private Medical Clinic_ , and it was a name that meant very little to Hopper – and, he presumed, to It as well – but, nevertheless, this was clearly the place that it intended to go.  


They had driven into Winterton, and slowed as they reached the centre of town, circling like a predator searching for the scent, and then had picked up speed again, and driven here. Hopper did not know why, or how It had known that this was the place that its enemies were, but known it evidently had.  


He was beginning to think that he could tell as well, could hear the faintest echoes of Its senses and thoughts. He could tell that they – that was how It thought of Joyce and El, not wishing to give them the dignity of names, and yet quite evidently noticing them in a way that it did not notice other human beings – were close, were here at this private hospital for some reason. He could tell that It had not come to talk, or to negotiate, or even to taunt or torment them as It had done to him for all those months in the Upside-Down, but quite simply to kill.  


But he could tell that it had not quite noticed him yet, had not realised that he was still fighting back, and so he kept winking, pushing against the great mental wall as hard as he could, as it drew the pistol that it had taken from Beeching’s soldiers from its pocket, and began to walk along the driveway.  


And then there was the sound of gunfire, sharp and precise, from not too far away, and the Mind Flayer stopped, and turned its head, and began to stalk towards the source. Hopper felt his reactions sharpen, the old combat reflexes somehow still kicking in after all those years, and as they moved closer and closer to the place where the fighting was coming from, he saw them, through the hedge.  


A tall man, his hair bright colours and spiked up into an enormous mohawk, was standing quite casually with his back to the hedge, holding a shotgun in one hand and a baseball bat in the other, firing shots into the dark opening in the ground before him, like some kind of cave or surfacing tunnel. Spilling out of the entrance were several figures, many of them bleeding from gunshot wounds, all dressed in various kinds of work uniform; their eyes were blank and empty, and their heads were tilted to one side, and they were slowly but surely advancing on the mohawked man.  


The Mind Flayer shrugged – it actually shrugged, and Hopper knew that the action could only be meant for him alone, since nobody else could see them – and levelled its gun at the man, and shot him in the back of the head, and he fell to the floor with a stunned gurgling sound, dead in the space of a moment. And then it turned, and walked away, completely ignoring the horde of cleaners and secretaries, and Hopper was powerless with shock.  


It was just another death. That was the worst part. It had seen somebody nearby, someone completely unaware of its presence, and had killed them for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and then had just walked away.  


And, as it strode up the driveway, towards the hospital, Hopper felt the anger begin to rise in him, and this time, he had no inclination to keep it down. And, once again, he threw the weight of his mind, of his identity, against the solid face of the Mind Flayer’s control over his body, and he felt something shift and crack on both sides.  


He blinked, and twitched his lip, but it kept walking. But now he felt like he was beginning to realise – that he had been going about things in entirely the wrong way, trying to prise open the cracks in its defences. That was far too slow, an approach made for time that he simply did not have. But emotion, anger, on the other hand; now, that was something that worked, fuel for his reconquest, even if it was burning him as well.  


He could hear more and more gunfire, as they drew closer to the hospital, and some other sound as well, a loud, deafening, whirring noise from above. He looked up, and saw that there was a black, unmarked helicopter descending towards the hospital, coming to rest on the rooftop as figures leapt out; and down below, faintly visible through the front doors, small explosions were shaking the building.  


There was a battle in progress, Hopper realised, and they were walking into the middle of it, and this thought did not fill him with nearly as much fear as it should have done. Battles, after all, were an excellent place to get shot, and that would not have been a bad result in his books, if it meant that the Mind Flayer was killed or even inconvenienced. By the edge of a water tower, there was another small melee going on, another contingent of uniformed people battling against some lone figure, a tall and solidly built dark-skinned man wielding a gun in each hand; this one seemed more even, although it was hard to tell from this distance. The Mind Flayer glanced at the fighting, and curved its mouth – no, his mouth, it was his – into a smile, and fired its pistol casually three times into the throng, and the defender fell to the floor as well, clutching at his side, along with two of the attackers.  


It walked on, and Hopper attacked again, letting the mute burning anger flow into every last facet of his mind, and then channelling that as he threw himself against the Mind Flayer’s defences, and something else shattered. And he fell to the floor, the temporary hold he had gained over some cluster of nerves leading to the left leg remaining in force for just long enough, and It noticed him.  


And he realised, as the Mind Flayer counterattacked, that the implacable wall that he had been fighting against beforehand was merely what its mind felt like when it was paying attention to something else, for the full force of its deliberate attention was nothing like that, as it burned and tore into his mind, like acid and fire and a thousand tiny knives all in one. But he was not going to give up that easily – he had absolutely nothing left to lose at this point, a small part of him thought bitterly to itself – and so, as the body under contention lay sprawled on the damp floor of the hospital lawn, he let the anger and pain fill himself up again, and struck back, as hard as he could.  


In the space of milliseconds, they waged a war of attrition against one another, the timeless abomination and the policeman; it pushed down on his sense of self with a constricting pressure, until he struck back at its mental flanks, and advanced into the corpus calossum; he seized control of its sense of hearing, and then it pivoted and counterattacked, and forced its way through his defences into the amygdala, from where it could rain down blows onto his memories; and it continued, and it continued, as the sun placidly shone and the other battle raged around them.  


And finally, It stood, and slowly, haltingly, began to walk again, advancing step by step towards the hospital, but it was not over yet, and Hopper summoned up every single spark of anger or flicker of pain or drop of despair, every last piece of emotion, and committed them to the war effort, and fought on.  


*******

The cold water ran beneath their feet, the only guide in this terrible place, and Dustin pulled himself forwards, and Steve as well with him.  


The walls were narrow enough by this point that, no matter how he stood, he was touching both of them at once, and the ceiling was low and jagged, darting down at unpredictable intervals. But he kept going, because there was absolutely no other choice.  


“Dustin,” murmured Steve, from behind him, and he felt the grip on his arm tighten slightly.  


“What is it?” said Dustin, feeling a spike of worry, because if Steve was using his first name, then the situation was worse than he had thought.  


“Go without me,” said Steve, his voice slurring slightly. “Leave me here. I’ll – I’ll catch you up or something.”  


Dustin shook his head, and then winced as the wall grazed his chin. “Come on, Steve. Obviously not happening.”  


“I’m slowing you down,” said Steve.  


“Yeah, well,” said Dustin, “I’ve got nowhere else to be. Now come on.”  


Steve said nothing for another minute or so, as they inched forwards, the pace necessitated by the darkness and the terrain and the pain, and then he coughed, and spoke.  


“There’s no point,” he said, and his voice was dry now. “In dragging me along. I’m dying anyway.”  


“You’re not,” said Dustin. “Just one small bullet wound. That’s all.”  


“Oh, and you’ve had loads?” said Steve, but the effect was ruined by another coughing fit.  


“You’ll be fine,” insisted Dustin. “It’s only your arm. You’ve got another one.”  


“That was my favourite one,” said Steve, for some reason, and they edged forwards another couple of steps, and then, with a splashing noise, Steve crumpled to the floor again. Dustin could not turn to face him, to help him, because the passageway was too thin, and in any case, he had no idea what he would have done.  


“Steve,” he said. “Come on. Get up. We can do this.”  


“We’re not going anywhere,” said Steve, quietly, and it sounded like his teeth were clenched. “This cave doesn’t go anywhere.”  


“Course it does,” said Dustin. “The stream has to flow somewhere. Otherwise it would be all flooded, back in the Russian base. It’s simple geography.”  


“Fuck your geography,” sighed Steve, and continued to lie motionless on the floor of a pitch-black cave, and then, with surprise, Dustin heard him sniffing slightly.  


“What is it?” he said.  


“It’s nothing,” said Steve, and his voice was slightly different. “It’s just. I don’t know. I don’t want to die. Buried hundreds of feet underground, alone apart from you. Nobody will know.”  


“Then don’t die,” said Dustin, letting the urgency into his voice. “Seriously, come on, Steve. You can do this. I know you can. You’ve killed monsters and survived Russian interrogation. You’ve been beaten up by everyone of your own age in the town. You’ve survived everything else so far. This isn’t going to be the thing that kills you.”  


Steve said nothing.  


“Right?” said Dustin, and he could hear the frantic tones in his own words. “Right?”  


“Yeah,” said Steve, softly, and then louder. “Yeah. You’re right.”  


“We’ve got things to do,” said Dustin, and they began to inch forwards again, almost on their knees now. “Your note said that there were three spies, and we still need to find the last one.”  


“We need to take Waxham down,” said Steve. “Bastard shot me. And wants to breed psychics for banking purposes.”  


“That’s the spirit,” said Dustin. “We need to work out this whole ghost nonsense.”  


“We need to find the others, tell them what’s happening.”  


“We need to help Robin deal with her shitty family.”  


“We need to stop Beeching, if he comes back.”  


“We need to…I don’t know. Find you a girlfriend.”  


“Hey,” protested Steve, and his voice was weak. “Don’t be rude to dying guys. It’s tacky.”  


“You’re not fucking dying,” said Dustin. “Not today. I’m not letting you.”  


And they kept going, into the darkness, around corners and bends and steep descents, following the stream as it ran silently towards its unknown destination, and maybe there was a pinprick of light in front of them, or maybe it was just wishful thinking, but Dustin would keep going towards it regardless, for as long as he could, and they would not give up, never, never.  


When the distant pale sunlight fell upon them at last, Steve’s eyes were closed.  


*******

It was just as dark as she remembered it being, there in the Void.  


El stood alone, the only living thing in the entirety of this place, be it world or dimension or realm of thought, and looked around in wonder and confusion. For she had not been here for over two hundred days now – not since she had gone to find Billy, and had been dragged into his memories, and barely made it out alive – and she had begun to wonder, in the depths of night and the hollows of despairing self-doubt, whether it had been forever barred to her by whatever had happened that night at Starcourt.  


But, no, she was here now. Home again.  


She passed an unknown amount of time doing nothing, but it did not matter, because this was not a place where time worked the same way as in the real world, unless she was looking directly at a person and seeing it pass along with them. She walked some distance, quiet and yet louder than anything else in existence there, and the ripples her feet left in the ankle-deep water spread out in all directions, becoming fainter and fainter, and yet nevertheless stretching off to infinity.  


It was quiet. It was peaceful. She could stay here, if she wanted.  


But she knew that that was not an option, not while everyone else was in danger, so she kept walking, trying to find somebody, for that would be the true test. She tried to remember how it had once been – a sharp, intense focus on the person in question, letting every salient feature they possessed be the roadmap that would lead her from her mind to theirs.  


She thought of Mike, of the angles and curves of his face, of the way that the light moved upon his dark hair, of the cadences of his voice, and she thought – just for a second – that she might have seen him, a ghostly, ephemeral image in the darkness, speaking to someone with a concerned look and a long fresh scar on his face, but he was gone before she could see or hear any more. Perhaps he was too far away to reach for now (although she had reached Russia, once, when she had been kept in the Lab), or perhaps she had been distracted at the crucial moment.  


She tried again, and this time, she thought of Will. Rather than his appearance, she thought of the shape of the thoughts associated with him: the unhesitating urge to protect and defend him; the complex combination of familiarity and friendship and sporadic irritation and gratitude and unspoken bonds; the intangible thing called having a brother. And she saw him, too, for another flash of a second, and he was running downhill, between the trees, Jonathan’s hand in one of his and Josh’s in the other; and then, again, he was gone. It was the same for everyone she tried, for Joyce and Max and Dustin and Lucas and Nancy and Steve and Robin; flashes, bursts of sight, and then nothing apart from the all-enveloping darkness of the Void, and she was suddenly filled with an empty frustration, because this was the furthest she had got in months, the most progress she had made since Starcourt, and to all intents and purposes, it seemed utterly pointless. She turned, although she was not sure what she was turning her back on, and strode away, through the dark water, from nowhere to nowhere.  


“You’re not quite there yet,” said a voice, a calm, warm voice, and El stopped dead in her tracks, freezing with anticipatory fear. Slowly, she turned her head to look over her left shoulder, and then her right, but there was nothing, nobody, for as far as she could see around her.  


“Who are you?” she said.  


There was a soft, rueful chuckle, and then the person said, “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to recognise my voice, now, should I?”  


El blinked, and in the moment it took her to blink, someone appeared before her, young and old at the same time, her dark blonde hair running untidily across her forehead, and a small smile at the corners of her mouth, and El knew in a heartbeat.  


“Mama,” she breathed. “But – how –“  


“Jane,” said Terry, and her voice was brimming with emotion, but distant emotion, like the echoes of something loud many miles away. “Oh, Jane, my god, look at you.”  


El ran towards the figure, and then realised that she would be insubstantial, and then decided that she didn’t care about that detail, and – somehow – she was in her mother’s arms, tight and comforting, and they were both crying.  


“How are you here?” she eventually asked.  


“It’s a very long story, Jane,” said Terry, smiling. “Do you call yourself Jane? Did you know that that was your name?”  


“My friends call me El,” she said, biting her lip. “But you were the one who named me, so –“  


“El,” said Terry, “I’ll call you whatever you want. Whatever you are, everything you are today, it’s because of you and not me. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there for you. For anything.”  


“It’s OK,” said El, softly, and felt like it was almost close to being true for once. “It’s OK, Mama. But I don’t understand how I can see you now.”  


“Well,” said Terry, smiling, as though she were about to tell a bedtime story, “there’s this place, El, that some people call the Between. It’s where everyone’s memories go, in the end, and sometimes, they shine through into this place even when they’re alive. It sits between our world and the dark place, and between every other possible world as well, and it is endless and timeless. And when I was – when Brenner did what he did to me, that was where my mind ended up. Here, lost in the Between, occasionally slipping into the dark world or into memories, and now slowly drifting away into nothingness. This is the last little piece of me that remains.”  


“The Between?” said El, in confusion. “I always called it the Void. They taught me how to spy on people using this place, how to find their enemies and listen to their conversations, while they were still having them.”  


“The name isn’t the important part, El, dear,” said Terry. “And as for the spying, the conversations – well, I suppose that experiencing something is just remembering it in the present tense, rather than the past.”  


El looked at her mother with a blend of confusion and respect. “You understand how this place works?”  


Terry grinned. “Not even slightly. Do you?”  


El smiled back, and shook her head, and Terry laughed slightly in response, a warm sound in the infinite space of the Void, the Between.  


“It’s so dark,” said El. “I thought that memories would be easier to see.”  


Terry shrugged. “To me, it looks white. Pure white, complete emptiness, in every direction.”  


El tilted her head in thought. “I always thought that emptiness was black. But when I was growing up, there were always lights everywhere.”  


Terry smiled in sympathy, and took her daughter into her arms again, and El stayed there.  


“Black and white aren’t so different,” she said. “Not really. The opposite of something is always a lot more similar to it than something completely different would be.”  


For a long while, or possibly for absolutely no time whatsoever, they said nothing.  


“You told me that I wasn’t quite there yet,” said El eventually. “When you found me.”  


“Yes,” said Terry, quietly, “I did. And you’re not. But you’re almost there, I think.”  


“Where?”  


“Yourself.”  


El considered this for a moment. “You mean my powers?”  


“You’re so much more than those powers, El,” said Terry. “So very much more. But that’s certainly part of it.”  


“I don’t understand why they went away,” said El. “I’ve tried everything. And I’ve managed to make it back to here, somehow. But the powers won’t come back. Not properly.”  


“When did they go away?” asked Terry, and El could not tell from her calm voice whether she already knew the answer somehow.  


“After Starcourt,” she said. “There was a battle. I pushed, harder than I’d done before. And the Mind Flayer bit me, and my brother had to cut it out of me. I used to think that one of those things was the cause.”  


“But now?” said Terry.  


“I don’t know,” said El. “There’s a doctor at the hospital where I’m sitting. She did scans and things. She said that my brain wasn’t broken, that it healed quickly. And my friend Maria thinks that it’s something psychological instead.”  


“Maybe it is,” said Terry neutrally. “El, tell me, what else happened that night?”  


“The world nearly ended,” she said. “We stopped it. Again. It’s what me and my friends do.”  


Terry smiled fondly. “Well done, dear. But was there anything else? Something bad, perhaps? Something that might have stayed with you, lodged itself into your subconscious?”  


El said nothing for a long time, and then said, very quietly, “Oh.”  


Terry raised her eyebrows.  


“That was when my dad died,” said El, no louder than a whisper. “I mean, the man who took me in. Who saved me. He died that night.”  


Terry’s eyes were filled once again with sympathy, but El kept talking. “But that can’t be it. It’s been two hundred and twenty-one days since then. There was a funeral, and I cried more than I’d ever cried before. I thought I was going to dry out like a raisin. And then we moved away, to Winterton, and we started again, moved on. When I remember him, or someone talks about him, or anything like that – I don’t cry, any more. I stop myself. Because I’ve moved on from that stage, from the despair in that five-step model. I’ve accepted it. It’s over, and I’m not still haunted by it, not subconsciously dwelling on it, not letting it block me out –“  


But by now, her voice was almost unintelligible, through the weight of emotions, and Terry held her again, close and warm and there, and the tears flowed once again, falling into the dark water of the Void and mixing with it, turning it from freshwater into the ocean one teardrop at a time.  


“I know,” said Terry, “I know.”  


And El knew that her mother was right, deep down, and it did not need saying, but she nodded in the smallest of motions nevertheless, and the message seemed to pass between them.  


“Why hasn’t it healed yet?” said El, eventually. “Why haven’t I healed?”  


“Because it takes a very long time,” said Terry, with a sad smile.  


“But it’s been two hundred and twenty-one days,” said El. “I’ve been through all of the stages. The Kubler-Ross thing. When does it heal?”  


“Grief isn’t as simple as that,” said Terry. “It would be wonderful if it was, I suppose. Knowing when it was over, when the whole checklist had been completed. But it doesn’t ever really stop. Not entirely. Because, El, dear, as long as someone you love is gone, there will always be an empty space in the world where they should be. It never gets filled again by anybody else; it never gets eroded or becomes invisible. The ones we love will always be with us, and so will their absences.”  


“But,” said El, “that means – you mean I’ll never be healed again? I’ll never get back to who I was?”  


“Well, yes and no,” said Terry, smiling wryly. “Will you ever be the same person, the same El, who existed before this battle? Why, no, of course not, and the harder you try, the further away the old you will be. But, you know, we’re always changing anyway, trauma or no trauma, and that certainly doesn’t mean that you’ll never recover.”  


“So why haven’t the powers come back?”  


“Well,” said Terry, “and I want to remind you that I have absolutely no qualifications in psychic research or in psychology, I think I might have a suggestion. I suspect that the problem isn’t that you’re grieving. It’s that you won’t let yourself grieve. El, acceptance doesn’t mean accepting that the whole thing is over, and that you should never feel sad about the dead ever again. It means that you’ve come to terms with the loss, that you’ve allowed it to become a part of you, and not shut it away like some secret nightmare. It means letting death be part of your life.”  


“But it’s horrible,” whispered El. “Death. People being gone.”  


“Yes,” agreed Terry, “but it’s the world.”  


They said nothing for a little bit.  


“So,” said El, “what do I do now?”  


“That’s very much your choice and not mine, dear,” said Terry. “I never wanted to be a pushy parent, after all.”  


El smiled slightly. “I mean, getting my powers back. My friends need them. They need me.”  


“They need you more than they need the powers,” said Terry. “But maybe it’s sufficient just to know what the problem is. Perhaps that’s how we heal, through self-knowledge.”  


El nodded, slowly, for it made sense to her. And she thought back on all the times that she had tried to use her powers in the last two hundred and twenty-one days, the nightly ritual with the piece of paper, and realised that of course her mind had been blocked, distracted, shadowed; for not once had she tried to move that paper without thinking of Hopper, or without talking to him afterwards in a one-sided midnight conversation, and every single time – she was coming to realise – she had never let herself feel what she truly wanted to feel in the way of grief, for it had been nothing but a distraction.  


“I think you’re right,” she said, instead. “I think I need to go back.”  


“Then go,” said Terry, smiling. “And do whatever you need to do to save the world this time. And always remember that, whatever remains of me in the multiverse, I am so very proud of you, my dear.”  


“Will I ever see you again?” said El, for she could see, now, how insubstantial her mother was, how flickering and temporary, and she finally understood what she had meant earlier, when she had said that she was drifting away into nothingness.  


“Yes,” said Terry. “Of course. Not like this, I shouldn’t think. But in memories, always.”  


And when they had parted, El opened her eyes, and saw the faint blue light shining from the inside of the elevator, and Maria’s concerned face.  


“El!” she said, in something that was both a shout and a whisper. “Are you alright? What happened?”  


“I went somewhere,” said El, and her voice was still full of the same peace that it had held in the Void, in the Between. “And I think I found the answer.”  


“To what?” said Maria.  


“Life,” said El, quite simply, and she took the camera from round her neck and set it on the floor between them, and then she stretched out her hand towards it.  


And she reached out with her mind, focusing her will on the camera, and felt the turning parts begin to move again, as they once had. And when she thought of Hopper – for there was no way that she would have been able to avoid it, any more than one could avoid thinking about an elephant when told not to – she did not push the thought away, as she had once done, or use it as fuel for anger, or tell herself that she had moved on.  


She let herself hurt, let the grief strike discordant notes in a minor key throughout her soul, and thought about the empty space in the world that was supposed to contain Jim Hopper, and accepted it.  


And the camera moved, slowly, rising into the air like a magic carpet.  


Maria stared at El with awe, and El smiled a wondering smile, and – without even thinking about it, purely by reflex – wiped the drop of blood from her nose with the back of her hand. And then, with a push of her will, she sent the camera spinning slowly towards Maria, and lowered it gently around her neck, and let go. And she considered her position, and thought about the likelihood of being heard by the Vestige, and then let out a joyous, wordless, cry.  


Maria hugged her in triumph, the camera digging into her chest, and tried to say around five things at once, resulting in something incomprehensible but definitively within the key of celebration. And El smiled, and quietly thought about her mother, and then remembered that her other mother was looking for them.  


With a flick of her hand and her will, the elevator began to rise through the shaft, slowly ascending on silent mechanisms, and finally, it clicked to a halt at the top, on the third floor of the building. She could hear noises on the other side, distant gunfire, and also low voices which she did not recognise.  


“Ready?” she said to Maria, and the other girl nodded, and they rose to their feet.  


El moved her head slightly in command, and the elevator doors slid open.  


On the other side stood Martin Brenner.  


*******

The sun was rising again, and the school was full of people.  


“Why are they here?” said Erica quietly, as the eight of them watched through the window of their classroom, watched the children and teachers troop across the parking lot and into the building. “Yesterday was Friday. They shouldn’t be here today.”  


Mike stared out at them, and looked at their faces, and tried to guess at what they might be thinking, what they might be feeling. Most of them looked tired – not just the tiredness of a typical weekday morning, but the tiredness that came from many nights of broken and fragmented sleep, like jetlag or despair – and there were several people, it appeared, who seemed uncertain themselves as to quite what they were doing there. Sometimes, people glanced skywards, at the rising sun, oddly red through the low and strung-out clouds.  


“Because it wasn’t yesterday for them,” said Robin, her voice low. “Come on, keep up. The sun’s been overhead twice since then. Saturday and Sunday on fast-forward.”  


“Only it wasn’t fast for everyone,” said Lucas. “Those people out there, they might have had twenty-four hours for each day. Or more.”  


“And now they’re coming back to school,” said Max. “The flow of time has started to break down around them. Portals to hell are opening all over town. And they’re coming to school like nothing’s happened.”  


“Because that’s what people do,” said Mike, nodding slightly. “When the world is falling apart, when everything is going crazy, they go back into their routines, because it’s safer there. More comfortable. They drink their glasses of wine and pretend that they’re living a normal family life. They file police reports about schoolyard rivalry and go to sleep in the back room. They hide.”  


“What are we going to do?” said Jasna. “What’s the plan?”  


There was a long silence.  


“Well,” said Mr Clarke, finally, “I know this might sound the obvious thing for the teacher here to say, but I think we should go to our lessons.”  


There was a predictable outcry from the room.  


“Listen,” said Mr Clarke, once he had managed to make himself heard again. “We’ve made our move, destroying the tower. And the Mind Flayer clearly isn’t about to attack us any time soon; we haven’t seen any sight of it through the portal, or anything like that. What we need to do now is to collect data, as much as possible, from as many people as possible. Ask your classmates, all of you, what they’ve been experiencing around Hawkins. What the weekend was like for them. Then we’ll meet at lunchtime, and report back our findings.”  


Mike, reluctantly, admitted to himself that this was probably the best course of action, even if it did mean sitting through a day of school approximately twelve hours (from his internal reference frame) after finishing the previous one.  


“But the world’s ending,” protested Max.  


“It’ll still be ending at lunchtime,” said Nancy, a note of dark humour in her voice. “If the Mind Flayer wanted to destroy us quickly, he wouldn’t have bothered with the psychological warfare, after all. This is supposed to hurt.”  


And so Mike Wheeler went to school, while the apocalypse swirled and swum into being outside the walls of Hawkins High. He unpacked his textbooks from his locker, and pushed his way through the crowded corridors to get to the right classroom, and listened closely to the chatter of his classmates, to the tiredness and confusion and faintly hidden fear in their voices.  


He stood when everyone else stood, at the start of the school day, and put his hand on his heart with the rest of them for the pledge to a faded flag. And as they spoke, the children of America, Mike Wheeler said nothing.  


“ _I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America_ ,” they said, as one, “ _and to the Republic for which it stands._ ”  


Mike looked around, met the eyes of Lucas and Max, and smiled with the very edges of his mouth, but nothing more, and certainly not with his eyes. They returned his gaze, and Lucas nodded ever so slightly.  


“ _One nation under God,_ ” said the children, etching the words onto their hearts with pens made of unthinking routine and traditions, “ _indivisible, with liberty and justice for all._ ”  


And Mike almost laughed then, but he did not, because he understood why nobody else was laughing.  


And then, as the class was settling down, opening their dog-eared copies of Mark Twain, there was a noise in the distance.  


It was a rattling, growling sound, the sound not of a monster but of an engine, and it was growing louder, doubling, tripling, and it was getting closer. There was some whispering in the class, people idly speculating about what kind of car might be that noisy, and Mike wanted to get up and run to the window, but was sadly aware of the normal rules that governed one’s code of conduct during lessons.  


The teacher tried to attract the attention of the class back to her, back to the illustrious Mr Twain and his incisive observations about society, but nobody was having any of it, muttering and murmuring and wondering.  


And then there was the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside, and a hush fell over the room, and with a crash, the door flew open.  


Five soldiers walked through, their uniforms quite plain and nondescript. They carried guns at their sides, their hands hovering deliberately over them, and for all the blankness and normality of their faces, they might as well have been wearing masks.  


The teacher tried to say something, to ask why there were armed soldiers in her classroom, but the words died away in her mouth, and emerged as a thin and abandoned noise, and they turned their backs on her, and looked down over the room, over the rows of silent children.  


“Michael Wheeler,” said one of them. “Maxine Mayfield. Dustin Henderson. Lucas Sinclair. Stand up.”  


Mike was frozen to his seat, motionless with confusion and fear, and so were the other two, by the looks of things, for the soldiers’ expressions shifted ever so slightly into something darker.  


“Wheeler, Mayfield, Henderson, Sinclair,” said their leader again. “Stand up right now. This is an order.”  


Still there was no movement, no motion.  


“Which ones are they?” said the soldier, turning to the teacher, and she cowered against her desk, and then raised her hand slightly, and pointed in the smallest of motions to the three of them.  


The soldier’s eyes met Mike’s, and Mike could not see a way out of this, nothing at all, so he rose on shaky legs, and out of the corner of his eyes, he could see the other two doing the same, and everything felt still and frozen around him, surreal and dreamlike in its horror and its inevitability.  


“Where’s Henderson?” said a soldier to the teacher. She shook her head by a couple of inches, and presumably the soldier saw the lack of knowledge in her eyes, for he turned away.  


“What do you want with us?” said Mike, his voice trembling slightly, but nevertheless strong enough to carry across the silent classroom. “What’s happening?”  


“Michael Wheeler,” said the leader of the soldiers, “Maxine Mayfield, Lucas Sinclair, you are under arrest. You are charged with sedition, espionage, conspiracy to cause civil unrest, terrorism, collusion with criminal elements, possession of seditious material, and treason.”  


“We’re innocent,” said Max, into the shell-shocked silence that followed this. “None of that’s true.”  


One of the soldiers strode forwards, and grabbed Lucas’s schoolbag, upending it onto his desk and scattering his work. He held up a small, dark-covered, book, which bore the title _The Communist Manifesto_ , and threw it to the ground with a cold triumph.  


“That’s one book,” said Lucas, very quietly. “It’s not illegal to read books. Liberty and justice for all.”  


“Possession of seditious material,” said the leader, his voice calm and impersonal.  


“Go on, then,” said Max. “Show us the evidence for all that other stuff.”  


The leader only shook his head. “This is not a courtroom. The three of you will come with us, and face charges.”  


And then the door burst open again, and Mr Clarke was there, his face deathly pale and agitated.  


“Sir,” said one of the soldiers, “please step away. This does not concern you.”  


“Those are my students,” said Mr Clarke, and if he was trying to be calm, he was not managing, for the raw fear in his voice shone through. “I promise you, there’s been a misunderstanding. Please, let’s talk about this.”  


There was a silence of perhaps half a second, and then one of the soldiers stepped calmly towards Mr Clarke, and raised his shotgun, and swung the butt of it sharply into the side of the other man’s head, and for the second time in a few hours, Mr Clarke fell to the floor, and there was blood pouring from the great gash in his skull, so much blood.  


But there was no time to pay attention to this, for now the soldiers were stepping forwards, their hands on their guns, and grabbing hold of the three of them by their shoulders, and Mike felt the iron grip close around him before he could do anything about any of this, before he could run or speak or react to this whole scene; and then they were dragging him, physically dragging him as he stumbled and tried to stand and failed, across the hard floor of the classroom, down the aisles between the desks, and out towards the door, over Mr Clarke’s motionless body.  


Mike turned to stare back at his classmates for one horrified second, and none of them would meet his eyes, not even the teacher. And then, just for a moment, he saw Troy look up at him, and smile slightly, and wink, and then look back down at the floor again.  


They dragged the three of them through the corridors and through the front doors of the school, and out into the biting cold of the new morning, and dumped them on the icy concrete of the parking lot. Mike looked up, past the stirring figures of Lucas and Max, and into the bright sun, and saw a whole row of soldiers standing in silhouette, great military trucks at their backs, and beside them, two men without guns.  


There was a noise from behind him, the sound of yelling and struggling, and Mike turned, to see that a pair of soldiers was frogmarching Nancy across the parking lot towards them, followed by a third soldiers training a pistol on her back. Blood was running from the corners of her mouth, and yet she kept shouting, kept struggling, against the inevitable.  


Mike stood, despite the warning shouts of the soldiers, and caught his sister as they roughly propelled her to the ground with the rest of them, supporting her and holding her. But she was not looking at him; she was looking over his shoulder, with a pale face.  


He turned back into the sun, and now that he was standing, he could see the people there. Two men, both of them quite familiar.  


“Hello again, Mr Wheeler,” said Jack Beeching, in a pleasant calm tenor, as he smiled like a man who had nothing to worry about.  


Mike ignored him, and turned his gaze to the other man. Lucas and Max were rising too, hand in hand, their eyes devoid of hope or defiance, and they too were staring at him, the four of them looked at the man who stood next to Beeching.  


“I’m sorry,” said Samuel Owens. “Truly, I’m sorry that things have had to come to this. But, Nancy, it’s like I said to you. I told you that I wouldn’t protect you forever.”  


*******

Will ran, and ran, and kept running.  


Down the hill, through the forests, over the roads and around the backs of gardens, they ran, and the Vestige followed them, far enough away that Josh could not touch them with his flames, and yet close enough for the fear to be a constant, insistent drumbeat echoing around the inside of Will’s head. And they were slowing now, legs tired and lungs working overtime, and it was clear that they would not be able to run forever.  


Will had no destination in mind, no backup plans, nothing in the way of a way out. The trick with the car had been good while it had lasted – it had given them their way out of that horrible cave, the lair beneath the tree – but he and Josh had not set anything else up to ensure their escape, an error which was becoming painfully obvious in hindsight. But, he reflected, perhaps there was nothing that they could have really done which would have made a great deal of difference. There had been thirty people in the cave, thirty people now following them, and possibly more scattered across the town as sleeper agents, or as missionaries bringing the blessing of the Vestige to the unsuspecting. They could run, they could run for a long time, but they would not be able to rest, for they would be found.  


Jonathan was slowing now, and Will turned to look at him, without breaking his pace, and saw that his brother’s face was horribly pale in the low afternoon sun, drained somehow, and although the old determination was still written across his face, he was flagging. And then there was a shout of alarm from Josh, and Will turned to look ahead again, and realised what had happened, realised the problems with running blindly without plans or directions.  


Before them stretched the sea, still and calm, a deep grey-blue from the rocky beach of Winterton to the horizon, to the edge of the world. And there was nowhere else to go.  


“This is it, isn’t it?” said Will, feeling a cold jolt run through him. It was like the feeling of falling, like the feeling of abruptly waking from half-sleep and noticing the hard-edged world still around you; it was the feeling of reality.  


“No,” said Josh, his voice unsteady but confident, as he turned, and put his back to the ocean. “There’s a way out. There’s always a way out.”  


“What, then?” said Jonathan, and Will realised with concern how quiet his brother’s voice was, almost lifeless.  


But Josh did not answer, for the Vestige was here now as well, its mouthpieces and footsoldiers slowing to a calm walk as they noticed the sea, fanning out into a half-circle and surrounding the three boys who stood on the jagged rocks of the beach. And Will turned, and looked desperately at the waters, and saw the impossible sight of people, ten, twenty, maybe more, rising from the winter ocean as they walked up towards the beach, their eyes hollow and their heads tilted as well, and he remembered too late that the Vestige liked it cold as well.  


“It’s over, Will Byers,” they said as one, their voices melding and intertwining. “We have won. This is the time.”  


“The time for what?” said Will, and he tried to make his voice sound strong, because he did not want the other two to think that the situation was necessarily hopeless. “All this time, you’ve been trading in half-truths and metaphors, never being quite clear. What do you want?”  


“You,” they said. “Your mind.”  


“Yeah,” said Will, “but why?”  


“You know this,” they said, a hint of irritation in their voice. “You have the answers. You were a part of Us, once, and you remember it. You remember Us.”  


“I know,” said Will. “But you’ve never explained. Why does that matter?”  


They said nothing, simply looking at him with those empty eyes.  


“You’ve spread over the whole of Winterton,” Will continued. “Maybe beyond. You can infect people, convert them, and you’re never going to stop, unless we stop you. You don’t seem to need my memories to conquer the world.”  


“And yet they are invaluable,” said one.  


“Instrumental,” said another.  


“Imperative,” said a third.  


“We need to know who we are,” said another one. “We must know our true nature. We must know the truth about Us.”  


“And you need my memories to do it,” said Will, his voice calm. “And when you’ve got them, then you’ll – what – know what His plans were? Or just become Him, become the Mind Flayer?”  


They said nothing, and he realised that they did not entirely know.  


Will turned to the other two. Jonathan looked like he was holding onto the world by a thin and fraying rope – he had slumped to the ground, and was breathing sharply through his teeth – but he was still holding onto it. Josh was brandishing the improvised flamethrower, and his eyes were burning with defiance. They were not the ones that the Vestige wanted, but they were not running.  


And Will looked at them both, took a long look as though he was trying to memorise every detail, because, to a certain degree, he was. He felt something running down his face, and was not sure whether it was a tear or just the spray of the softly breaking waves, and he smiled, because he did not know whether he would ever get to do that again.  


“Jonathan,” he said. “Josh. Listen to me. I really don’t think there’s any other way out of this.”  


“We can fight,” said Josh, desperation in his voice.  


“Not forever,” said Will.  


“We can die,” said Jonathan, his voice a whisper.  


“We’re not cold enough to kill each other,” said Will. “You know that. And I’m glad. That’s not the way this should end.”  


“Then how?” said Josh. “How does it end, Will?”  


“With dignity,” said Will, quietly.  


Jonathan was shaking his head, weakly, but Will turned away, because it was time.  


“I need both of you to trust me,” he said, keeping his voice utterly calm and serene. “I need to know that you trust me, before I go.”  


“You’re not going,” said Jonathan, faintly. “You can’t.”  


“We’ll trust you to the ends of the earth,” said Josh, “but you can’t go.”  


“Thank you,” said Will, and he felt ever so slightly lighter now, felt that maybe this wouldn’t be as hard as he’d hoped. “Jonathan, tell Mom, and El. Tell them that I’m sorry, but that there was no other way.”  


“No,” said Jonathan, and his voice was a whisper in the wind.  


“Josh,” continued Will. “Can you do something for me as well?”  


“Will,” said Josh, and the defiance, the confidence, the humour, all of that was gone from his voice, all the masks, leaving behind something utterly sincere. “If you haven’t worked it out by now, then I’m not sure what to tell you. I would do absolutely anything for you.”  


Will paused, and swallowed, and then smiled again, ruefully, as he took a step forward, and then another one, and then another, towards the waiting ranks of the Vestige. “Thank you.”  


“What do you need me to do?” said Josh.  


A silence fell across the beach, broken only by the quiet sounds of the waves and the far-off birds, and Will lowered himself to his knees. And a man with empty eyes walked forwards to meet him, and raised his hands towards Will’s temples.  


“Remember me,” said Will, and he smiled one last time, because he thought that those were some rather good last words.  


And the Vestige’s fingertips made contact with him, and then everything – the people, the birds, the distant houses and buildings, the rocks and the waves, the ocean and the land and the sky – was gone, like a wind had blown the world away, and all that remained was light.  


*******

Jasna Konstanjević was looking out of the window when the soldiers came.  


She saw the trucks as they pulled into the parking lot, saw the men with guns climb calmly out and walk towards the school, saw the hammer begin to fall, and she stood.  


“Miss Konstanjević,” said her teacher, pronouncing the name incorrectly, “please sit back down again.”  


But Jasna said nothing, as she stepped out from behind her desk, and began to walk towards the front of the room, and as she did, she looked at Robin, looked right into her eyes. The other girl opened her mouth as if to say something, and then blinked, and must have read Jasna’s expression, for she looked over her shoulder out of the window, and then stiffened, and leapt to her feet herself.  


“Both of you,” said the teacher, sounding confused but not exactly angry, “will you please sit down?”  


“Sorry, sir,” said Robin hurriedly. “It’s, erm, a medical emergency – we’re just going to, erm –“  


“Go to the nurse,” finished Jasna, somewhat unconvincingly. “We’ll be back as soon as we can.”  


And before the teacher could really say anything else, or react, the door was slamming closed behind them, and they looked at each other, and took each other’s hands, and then began to run.  


Jasna hoped that Robin knew where she was going, for she had no idea, apart from the general impression that it needed to be in the opposite direction to the soldiers. And then they rounded the corner, and it was a dead end, apart from the bathrooms and an oddly large storage closet, and Robin shrugged, and yanked open the double doors, and grabbed Jasna by the arm, and pulled her in after her. And when the doors closed, it was completely dark, and the only thing telling Jasna that someone else was in there with her was the sound of quiet and deliberately regular breathing, and a slight warmth from the places that Robin was close to her.  


“I presume they’re here for us,” said Robin, in a whisper, and Jasna could feel her breath against her cheek, and tried not to focus on that.  


“That would make sense,” she replied, just as quietly. “Otherwise this would be a bit of an overreaction.”  


Robin’s breath caught in a silent laugh, and a flash of warmth rushed over Jasna.  


“How long do we wait?” said Jasna.  


Her eyes were adjusting quickly enough to the darkness that the movement of Robin’s shrug was just about visible. “God knows. As long as we have to.”  


And the minutes began to pass, and Jasna began to become aware of several things. One of them was the sound of her own heartbeat, which she had never exactly paid much attention to before, concerningly loud in the silence of that closet. Another was the fact that there was something – a mop, perhaps – digging into her left shoulder slightly, which was becoming more and more noticeable with every second, although she did not dare to move. And then another, and Jasna was honestly baffled at the part of her mind choosing to pay attention to this, was the fact that Robin was standing a distance of mere inches away from her in the darkness, breathing against her cheek and neck, their fingers still intertwined from the running, and that they were not actually very different in height despite how Robin’s confidence made her seem significantly taller.  


And then she heard the footsteps outside in the corridor, many different people, ordered and harsh, the sound of combat boots on the linoleum floor. Robin’s breathing caught, and then stopped, and Jasna was momentarily terrified, before she realised that the other girl was obviously just holding her breath; and she followed suit.  


“We know you’re here somewhere,” said a voice from the corridor, and it sounded bored. “Come on, girl, out you come. We've got your friends; we just need you. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.”  


And, all at once, Jasna knew what she had to do, the idea coming to her in a flash and rooting itself deep within her mind, so that it was less of a plan and more of an inevitability. She let out the breath she had been holding, slowly and surely, and gritted her teeth, and closed her eyes, and then opened them again.  


“Robin,” she whispered, almost inaudible. “I’m really very sorry about this.”  


Robin’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion – Jasna could see them now, could see through the darkness to the little details of the other girl’s face – and she whispered back, “What are you doing?”  


“Something brave,” whispered Jasna, and then she leaned forwards, and closed the gap between them, and – for no more than a second of real time, for an eternity of subjective experience – their lips met in a kiss, the first kiss of her life, and every single part of her brain shouted and sang and sent a thousand thousand messages to every other part of her brain, and before she could lose herself in the experience, she pulled away, and forced her eyes open, to see that Robin’s face was utterly motionless in an expression that Jasna could not identify, but which seemed to contain a great deal of shock, and she wanted to ask what it was, or to apologise again, or to kiss her again, or anything apart from what she was doing, but that was not the plan, so Jasna Konstanjević pushed open one of the double doors, and stepped out into the corridor, closing it behind her.  


“Well,” she said to the soldiers, “here I am.”  


They marched her to the parking lot, and she did not try to run. Nancy was there, and Mike, and Lucas and Max, and she tried to smile at them. She was not really sure what to be focusing on right now.  


“Get those four into the trucks,” said a square-jawed man in a pristine uniform, stepping forward and gesticulating vaguely at the others, and several soldiers obeyed, grabbing the struggling, shouting, captives, and marching them towards the vehicles behind them. “We’re taking them back to Ansted with us.”  


“That wasn’t the arrangement,” said another man, his voice familiar, and Jasna blinked in the bright sunlight, and saw that it was Owens, the man from Longbow House. “We agreed to send them to a neutral facility, Jack.”  


“Yes,” said the other man, smiling, “well, things have a tendency of changing, don’t they, Sammy? That’s sort of why people keep soldiers around, so that they can be the ones who drive the changes.”  


Owens said nothing, and Jasna met his eyes for a half-second, and she could see regret and determination in equal measure there.  


“But,” she whispered, unsure quite why she was saying anything, and then raised her voice, “what about me? Why not imprison me too? Why don’t you take me to your secret prison?”  


“Ah, Miss Konstanjević,” said Jack Beeching, turning to her with a calm smile. “You’re in luck, I’m happy to say. I’ve spoken to your parents, and we’ve decided that we’re not going to press charges against you for falling in with these criminals. We all make mistakes, after all.”  


And Jasna felt her chest constrict, as from behind the row of military vehicles stepped a very familiar man and woman, wearing expensive coats and black gloves and utterly impassive faces, and she was frozen to the spot as they walked towards her.  


“We’re taking you home, Jasna,” said her father. “We’re going home.”  


“No,” she whispered, “no, no, no –“  


But they had taken hold of one arm each, and they began to walk, leading her away from the parking lot towards the shining car on the road beyond, and Jasna struggled, but their grip was firm. She craned her neck, looking for the others, but they were gone now as well, and the sun was bright, it was so bright, and the soldiers were beginning to move away, to spread out and go their own separate ways to different parts of the town, and there was no escape.  


“Jasna,” said her mother, as they opened the doors of the car, as the dark green truck that contained her friends juddered to life and began to move, “we’ll talk about this whole thing later.”  


“We want to hear the whole story,” said her father.  


“But we’ve got you back now,” said her mother, as the car doors closed like the gates of a prison cell, “and that’s the important thing.”  


*******

Eventually, the battle was over.  


Joyce Byers wiped the blood absently from her cheek – she was relatively sure that it was not hers – and stared at the devastation that lay in front of her. The bodies of the Vestige’s soldiers were sprawled across the hospital lobby and down the rubble-filled corridor, and so were several of her defenders, the former staff members there, and in death, they all looked the same. Lingwood was still half-sitting, despite the gaping hole in his chest and the emptiness behind his eyes – a different sort of emptiness to the one that had signified the presence of the Vestige – and, as much as possible, he looked at peace. Vaudrais, too, was there, the broken body of the doctor lying on the floor at the centre of the room, with three of her enemies around her. At the end, she had been brave, and Joyce did not know whether this made up for her other actions in allowing the Vestige’s contagion to grow and spread, but it hardly seemed like the time to think about such things.  


Beyond the lobby, down at the end of the corridor, rose a wall of rubble, from the grenades and improvised explosives that they had used. It had destroyed a large part of the hospital, but it had done its job, sealing the stairwell for good, trapping the majority of the Vestige’s army underground. El and Maria were somewhere down there as well, maybe in the morgue still, or maybe in the air vents or somewhere else, but Joyce was relatively sure that they were safe; for if the Vestige had been able to get its hands on them, she knew that it would have used them as hostages to force the defenders to surrender, and Joyce would have done so as well.  


She had thought, at one point, that she had heard a helicopter coming, bringing the cavalry to help. But no help had arrived, so perhaps that had just been wishful thinking, or hallucination, or something in the disputed borderlands between the two. There had been no word from Axel or Funshine; but neither had there been a surprise attack in the rear; perhaps they were still fighting.  


She should go and see, Joyce decided; offer her help if necessary. So she looked over the battlefield once again, knowing as she did so that the sight would never be far from her memories, and then turned, and walked to the doors, and pushed them open.  


On the other side, out on the lawn not far from the hospital entrance, stood a man, silhouetted against the sun, and Joyce felt a shock run through her, because for all the world, that silhouette looked just like –  


The man stepped forwards, into a shadow, and Joyce Byers looked into the eyes of Jim Hopper.  


The entire universe paused, or so it seemed. There was no birdsong, no gunfire, no distant traffic. There were no soldiers from one side or the other, no government officials or Vestige mouthpieces or Russian assassins; no crackling machines firing energy into the gap between worlds; no misunderstandings or magnets or memories. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, apart from the two of them.  


“Hop,” said Joyce, in what felt like a reflex action rather like breathing, but more unexpected, and she took an unsteady step towards him, to the top of the steps that led down to the lawn.  


He was still, completely still, apart from his eyes, which were wild and uncontrolled, darting in all directions, from her to the hospital to the ground to the sky to the trees to the hedges and back to her again, and he took a step forwards as well.  


She gasped in a deep breath, because the feeling within her was like falling and flying and being punched in the stomach and being spun around a hundred times, and was just as unexpected and disorientating and painful and terrifying as all of them, and then she reached her hand up to her face, and found that there were tears streaming down it, and that they were mirrored by similar tears on the lined, bearded, scarred and beaten and half-broken face of the man that she had loved and killed.  


“Hop,” she said again, and she could hear how her voice wavered.  


“Joyce,” said Hopper, and his voice was stiff, rusty, apparently forced through his lips, brimming with emotion and yet oddly hollow. And he took another step towards her, and for a reason she did not quite understand, he was shaking his head compulsively, twitching it from side to side, as though he were trying to discourage her from something.  


“It’s you,” she said. “Oh, my god, it’s you, it’s you –“  


She should have been running towards him, a small part of her brain thought. That was how the stories always went, the reunions. But she was frozen, utterly motionless, powerless, before the universe.  


And then she noticed.  


He was holding a pistol in his hand. He had been the whole time. And he was raising it, slowly, as slowly as an iceberg or the fall of an empire, towards her.  


“Hop,” she whispered, and her feet would not move, “what are you doing?”  


Time stood still.  


She looked into his eyes again, and saw that it was not a tear that was running from the corner of his eye, trickling down his bearded face. It looked rather like ink, black ink.  


“No,” he whispered, his voice anguished, and she did not understand, she did not understand any of this.  


And still he stood there, his eyes flickering, his expression completely and utterly frozen, and then there was an eruption of sound, a great ringing echoing bang, and then another one, and the gun fell from Hopper’s rigid fingers, and hit the lawn, where it stayed.  


She did not understand. She did not understand.  


The world turned upside down, and the sky leapt towards the ground, and she felt something solid make contact with her head, and realised that it was the concrete steps of the hospital, and that she had fallen.  


He stood over her, and still he did not move, as the ink ran down across both of his cheeks and into his mouth.  


She could not feel her legs, she suddenly realised. There was nothing there, and then the nothingness was filled with a slowly building, spreading, dull pain, which pulsed across her hip and then upwards into her side and her back and everywhere.  


“Hop,” she said, because she did not know what else to say.  


The pain was in her ribs now, and her shoulders and arms, and her neck, still pulsing outwards from her left hip, and she tried to crane her neck to look at the spot, but she found that she could not actually move in any way.  


Her eyes closed, and then they opened again, and she saw Jim Hopper standing dumbly beside her, motionless and silent, and then they closed once more.  


She was drifting. She was slipping away.  


And then she heard something. A voice. It was a voice. His voice.  


Singing.  


“ _You don’t tug on Superman’s cape_ ,” sang the voice of Jim Hopper, slow and rusty and out of tune and deeply, deeply, wrong, just beneath the surface, “ _you don’t spit into the wind._ ”  


Joyce Byers stopped breathing.  


“ _You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger_ ,” sang the voice of the Mind Flayer, and it turned and began to walk away, “ _and you don’t mess around with Jim._ ”  


_**END OF PART TWO** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really am very sorry about that.
> 
> There we are - the end of Part Two of the story! Part Three will be beginning some time in January, although I'll be taking a slight hiatus in order to map out the whole course of the next (and final) seven chapters, as well as to apply for PhDs and start work on my second piece of coursework - don't worry, though, there'll definitely be more. It would be the act of a sadist to leave you with a cliffhanger like this, after all...
> 
> To all the four thousand people who have read this story so far, and especially to those who have left kudos, bookmarks, or comments, thank you so very much! It's been incredibly affirming and encouraging to see that there are people who like this nonsense enough to come back to it or show their appreciation, and has been invaluable in persuading me to keep writing. If you have any thoughts about this chapter - be they positive, negative, both, neither, confused, angry, or any other emotions - or any questions about precisely what the hell is going on here, please do feel free to leave comments, since I always love reading and responding to them!
> 
> As mentioned above, the next update will hopefully be coming out by the end of January. From there, I'm roughly estimating that there'll be another chapter every two or three weeks or thereabouts, so we'll be finishing - if all goes to plan - somewhere in the region of May, I reckon.
> 
> Coming soon, then: Chapter 15 - Psycho Killer...


	15. Psycho Killer

_****_

_**PART THREE: NO MORE LIES** _

Imagine, if you will, that you could see everything in the world.  


Not merely the physical objects, the mountains and oceans, roads and buildings, although they are of course significant. This is not to suggest that this is a mere matter of finding a sufficiently high place to stand, and looking down over the world, in the hope that you might be able to see your house from there.   


Imagine that you can see the invisible things as well. The rippling electromagnetic waves, for instance; the radio signals that pulse and dance across the world, layer upon layer, each carrying their own distinct message. Some of them are loving conversations, and some are confidential transmissions, and some are mysterious and enigmatic messages from somewhere else. Let’s say that, in that moment of perfect sight, you can decipher each and every one of them.  


And there’s the other invisible things, as well. Ideas. Countries. Memories. Let’s imagine that you can see them too, as if they were nothing more than fragments of torn fabric. You can see everything. That’s the point.  


If you were to ask Lucas Sinclair about a scenario such as this, he would talk to you, in a mildly guarded tone (for that is generally the way that he talks) about something called Laplace’s Demon. If you mentioned it to Jasna Konstanjević, she would call it ‘omniscience’.   


If you spoke about this little thought experiment to a certain someone else – not that you could – then they would have said that you understood the reasons for all of this. Perhaps they would have apologised. Perhaps they would have recognised that there was little point in apology at this stage.  


This will be important later.  


*******

_Jim Hopper burned._  


(The Mind Flayer smiled with a dark satisfaction, and sang, just to twist the screws a little tighter, and stepped over the dying body before it, the woman who lay on the cold concrete steps with a bullet in her stomach and another in her hips. It was not yet finished.)  


_Jim Hopper screamed and wept and shattered._  


(Now it was inside, standing within the hospital lobby, and it was littered with corpses, strewn carelessly across the floor. It half-wondered what had happened here, and then decided that it was not important.)  


_Jim Hopper was lost, was powerless. Any footholds he had managed to hold over his brain were long gone, torn away by the shock of seeing the bullets strike into Joyce, and he had fallen, and he could not move, could not fight, could not live any more if he would only be given the option –_  


(It peered into the darkness of a rubble-covered corridor, and saw movement at the other end, a human stepping out from around the corner. To a certain degree, all humans looked the same to it, but this one was tall and grey-haired, with faded scars covering his face and a certain pride in his posture. The human stared at the Mind Flayer, curiosity in his eyes, and blinked in what might have been surprise, and took a cautious step towards it.)  


_Jim Hopper had killed her. He had not been able to stop It. He would not be able to do anything else, to fight any of Its plans; and he would have to watch as the world was punished for his failure –_  


(And then there was a light, a light so bright that the word ‘bright’ scarcely sufficed to communicate its intensity, exploding and erupting across the hospital lobby between the scarred man and the thing that called itself Us, and a wave of sensations and emotions and experiences poured out of it for no more than a half-second; and then there was the crashing sound of two bodies hitting the floor.)  


_Jim Hopper did not care. Not now._  


(The Mind Flayer recoiled from the light, in an action born of pure instinct, and did not ask itself why. It stepped backwards, one step and then another and then another, and raised an arm, in an unthinking gesture of protection.)  


_Jim Hopper watched everything happen, but he was no more than a passenger now, a spectator. It had broken him, fully and comprehensively._  


(As the light faded to a bone-white silver-grey darkness, the Mind Flayer could see more clearly now. The scarred man was gone by now, had disappeared back round the corner, but this was not important, for there were two new figures there on the floor, two humans who had not been there before, and they glowed dimly with the pale light of another place entirely. And the thing that called itself Us looked at them, and thought, and came to the decision that it was not worth the risk in staying here any longer, when something like this might happen. It did not understand the light, the people that it had spat out, and it knew that errors and setbacks came from the unexpected more than anything else. So it backed away, as the figures stirred on the floor, and then – realising that it had nobody to impress here, since the policeman in the corner of its brain was quite thoroughly shattered into a thousand tiny pieces by this point, and would never stop fearing it for the rest of his undoubtedly short existence – the Mind Flayer turned, and ran, back outside, over the body of the dying woman (or was she dead by now?), past the spreading hordes of shambling cleaners and secretaries, back to the car that it had left at the end of the driveway.)  


_Jim Hopper –_   


(After all, it thought to itself as it climbed back into the car, and started the engine, and began to speed down the empty road, this had not exactly been an important errand to run, not really. This had been about revenge, and pain, and its own pride. This was about the glory of Us. But now, the important work was about to begin.)  


_– perhaps it did not matter, not really, what Jim Hopper thought about anything any more –_  


*******

And there they were again, doubled in number now since the last time. Back in the dark, back in the cold. Back in prison. Back in Ansted once again.  


They arrived approximately ten minutes before the final round of painkillers wore off, and so it was a cold stone floor that Mike collapsed onto, feeling the bruises in his side and the great scar in his face pulse and stab and pour the pain back into him, rather than the back of the military truck that had driven them up into the mountains, off the roads, into the fortress. The pain, he thought hazily, was sharper now, more focused; the time spent holding it at bay had merely clarified the nature of his wounds, rather than healing them in any way.   


So he lay on the floor, where once he had been able to sit calmly on a chair and concoct strategies and apologies, and he waited for the pain to overwhelm him and push him into unconsciousness.  


It happened, eventually, but not before the magnitude of their situation had dawned on him.  


When he woke, slipping briefly into consciousness in a shortcut from one fevered dream to another, there were other people there with him. There was light, bright enough to make him close his eyes again in instinctual shock, and loud voices, and the feel of a hand on his forehead.  


One of the voices was unfamiliar, and the other one sounded like Max. Mike tried to make out the words, he really tried, but somewhere between his ears and his brain, the signal became jumbled, and all that he was able to gather from the situation was anger, rage, helpless and contained fury being thrown by Max at the guards of their prison.   


“I’m OK,” he said, or attempted to say, but it sounded feeble and incoherent even to his own ears. The hand on his forehead twitched away in surprise, and then was back, stroking gently across his head, moving hair away from the half-sealed scars.  


“It’s me,” said Nancy, her voice sounding strangely distant. “It’s OK, Mike, it’s OK. I’ve got you.”  


“We’re here for you,” said Lucas, from the other end of a mile-long tunnel. “Stay with us.”  


Mike nodded slightly, and made a noise of polite agreement, and then passed out again.  


Somewhere in the next set of dreams, he thought he saw El’s face, her brows furrowed in pained concentration, her teeth gritted, and he knew that wherever she was, it was not somewhere that she wanted to be.  


“El,” he said, but no sound came out of his mouth.  


“Mike,” she whispered, and he heard his own pain being reflected back, and then he blinked, and she was gone, and the prison cell was back.  


It was quieter now – the guards had gone, or at least Max had acquiesced, and the light was dim and cold.  


“– what they’d actually charge us with,” Lucas was saying in a low voice. “Whatever they were saying back there, that can’t be the actual plan.”  


“They can’t convict you, us, just for having a book,” said Max, but she didn’t sound sure. “There’s laws, and the constitution, and stuff like that. No jury would agree to that.”  


Mike opened his eyes a fraction wider, and could see the three of them now, sitting in a small circle a little way away from him. Nancy was shaking her head.  


“Max,” she said, “come on. Have you seen a single piece of culture in this country since the Cold War began? Have you listened to the news lately?”  


“I prefer their early stuff,” said Max, but the joke fell flat; her heart, it seemed, had not really been in it in the first place.  


“They won’t even bring us before a jury anyway,” Nancy continued. “We’re in the other world now, the world of the shadow government, the one that…”  


She trailed off, and Mike realised why.  


“Owens,” he said, in a faint croak, and all three heads spun to face him, expressions of concern on their faces.  


“Are you alright?” asked Lucas.  


Mike shrugged, and even this small action sent a jolt of pain through him. “Been better. How long?”  


“We don’t know,” said Max. “There’s no clock or windows or anything. Maybe twelve hours?”  


Mike closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “Shit.”  


“Yeah,” said Nancy. “Shit.”  


“He betrayed us,” said Mike.   


“Yep,” said Lucas, darkly. “We should have known, really, shouldn’t we? A man in the highest ranks of the government, with his own private army, who knew all about the Upside-Down and the Mind Flayer and everything? Far too good to be true.”  


“But he hated Beeching,” said Nancy, her tone very level. “He told us that, back in Washington, back in Longbow House. The two of them were basically arch-enemies, the way he told it, engaged in some kind of cold war of their own over the control of the country.”  


“And Beeching hated him too,” said Max. “When we were here last, he was talking about how much he’d have loved it if Owens had been killed at the Lab back in ’84.”  


“So,” said Mike, trying to ease himself into a slightly more upright position, and giving up after the pain returned in full force to the side of his ribcage, “why?”  


Lucas pursed his lips. “They must have had a common enemy. Or a common goal.”  


“The Upside-Down,” said Mike.  


Nancy nodded. “Although I don’t know if that’s the goal or the enemy. But yeah, you’re right. Pretty convenient that they arrived just after everything had collapsed again, after the Gates had opened and the town was having some kind of collective nervous breakdown and the flow of time had been entirely fucked with.”  


“They didn’t want us,” said Mike. “They wanted Hawkins. We were just in the way.”  


“No,” said Max. “They wanted us. We’ve been the ones messing up everyone’s plans this whole time; you guys with El, and then us with the Lab, and then the Russians, and then that spy-swapping nonsense back in January. We’re rogue elements.”  


Lucas nodded. “If I was Beeching, I’d want the children out of the way, before they could blow up yet another carefully-planned operation.”  


“So why didn’t they kill us?” said Nancy.  


A silence fell over the cell.  


“I mean, come on,” she continued. “Don’t say morals, because Beeching doesn’t have any of those, and Owens does, but he doesn’t want to let them affect his actions in any way. Don’t say public image, because there was nothing to stop them from taking us away and shooting us somewhere private. We’ve still got some use.”  


“They’ll interrogate us,” said Mike. “Properly, this time. No more lies.”  


Max nodded. “Maybe they’ll return us when all of this is over. Or maybe they’ll just kill us once they’ve got everything they want from us.”  


“You’re optimistic,” said Lucas.  


“Oh, sorry, stalker, I forgot that we were going to get out of here through the power of positive thinking –“ Max began, but Lucas cut her off.  


“No,” he said, “I mean it. Genuinely. You’re a lot more optimistic than I am about this.”  


“In saying that there’s a chance that they might not execute us?”  


“In saying that there might be somewhere to return to, when all of this is over,” said Lucas, smiling bleakly. “I’m not convinced that this one isn’t going to end with the world being destroyed.”  


“We held it off twice,” said Mike.  


“You think that Beeching can do the same?” said Nancy. “You think he even wants to seal the Upside-Down away, if there’s a chance that he can use it instead?”  


Mike, slowly, shook his head, and felt the pain wash over him again. “No. He’s got everything he wants. Hawkins is his, and Owens has been neutralised or fallen into line, and there’s nobody left to stop him. Jack Beeching has won.”  


*******

Robin Buckley sat in the darkness for a long time after the soldiers had gone, in silence and fear and confusion and a hundred other things besides.  


They had taken them. They had invaded the school, and taken them all, taken Jasna from right in front of her, and she hadn’t been able to do anything. She’d destroyed a ghost, and come to terms with her memories, and blown up a massive tower in the Upside-Down, and none of it had mattered, because she’d been just as powerless when it really came down to it.  


But this was not a time for despair. Jasna had done something brave to save her, and she was going to make the other girl’s sacrifice count. She had to.   


Slowly, shakily, she rose to her feet, in the full knowledge that there was every possibility that she was going to be found and captured and taken away to where the others had gone. Because if the soldiers had come here, into the school – into the heart of the school that she had attended every day for years, into a place full of defenceless people, for the express purpose of seizing and abducting children – then there was nowhere that they would not go.  


But, nonetheless, she pushed the door open by a crack, and peered through the gap into the empty corridor beyond, and then, after a deep breath through lips that were still burning with recent memory, she stepped out.  


It was very quiet now, and Robin was not sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. On the one hand, it was a relief that there were no soldiers marching up and down the corridors, no orders for her arrest (for surely they would realise that she was missing before too long) being broadcast over the speakers. On the other, it was by no means a comforting silence; it was the silence of people holding their breath, the silence of people who knew that words would bring the possibility of punishment. It was a silence flavoured with fear, and Robin knew those all too well.  


She rounded the first corner, after some time hesitating, and considered her next move. She needed to get out of the school, that much was clear – but the front entrance would surely be under surveillance if not under armed guard, and the longer she was in the building for, the more likely it became that somebody would see her and report her.  


There was a door at the end of the corridor, leading to the outside, and she regarded it cautiously. It was entirely possible that they might be waiting here as well, that they might have the entire school completely and utterly surrounded; but then she gritted her teeth, and forced herself to stop being paranoid and consider things objectively. The soldiers were clearly not deliberately looking for her still; they had not called for her by name when Jasna had – when Jasna had done what she had done – and they were not actively patrolling the school in the hope of finding someone else to add to their collection of prisoners, by the looks of things.  


So she opened the door and stepped out into the cold open air, walking with a deliberate and measured calm, like someone who was in no way being pursued by the army, and strolled – not a rush, not a hurry, but a stroll – away from the building, in the direction of the playing fields and the bleachers and the woods behind them; and only after a few minutes, when she was absolutely sure that there was nobody watching her, did she allow herself to break into something approaching a run.  


She came to a halt at the other edge of the woods, with the realisation eventually reaching her that she had nothing in the way of a plan beyond getting out of the school. In the hollow of a half-dead tree, she crouched down, tucking her numb-fingered hands into her pockets for warmth, and tried not to breathe as much as possible, since she was very aware that her breath would be visible to anyone looking in her direction. And, eventually, she poked her head around the edge of the tree, and looked down the slope, and onto one end of the main street of the town of Hawkins.  


There were soldiers there, ten, maybe fifteen, their casual manner utterly at odds with the guns at their hips. They had brought some large green vehicle to a halt in the middle of the road, and had extended some kind of barrier across the rest of the road, and as cars headed towards them, they were stopped and interrogated and eventually allowed to pass with the lifting of the barrier. Behind them, utterly untroubled by the incongruity of the scene, a red-and-white striped awning fluttered merrily above the dry-cleaners; but beneath it, there were men with guns, where they had never been before.  


No, Robin thought. Of course they had. The sight of American soldiers on the main street was unusual, yes, but it was not really a break with the past. Not when you got down to the general principle of the thing. For years, the town had been home to an outpost of the government, run and staffed by the military; and even when the Lab had fallen, it had not meant that the arm of the law was any less present, or any less threatening for those who deviated. The only difference, really, was that the people of Hawkins were not used to seeing their overlords like this in the flesh, since they were normally only on the television screens and in the cinemas, dressed up as protectors of freedom.  


And she bit her lip to stop herself from laughing bitterly, because she had been cynical, yes, but not cynical enough. Of course the soldiers would have come to town, when things started to fall apart, when the centre began exhibiting signs of being unable to hold. Just because she had blown up a tower (and, at the back of her mind, there lurked the awareness that something about that had been wrong, but it was hardly the most important thing here and now) didn’t mean that any of the problems they were facing would be solved. The fact that people weren’t seeing ghosts any more didn’t really matter, not really, because the only reason that she (and Steve, and Nancy, and the children, and Jasna) had been able to get away with, well, any of this, was that the causes of the traumas hadn’t been paying all that much attention to them up until now.  


She stood, slowly, taking care to keep the tree between herself and the street, and backed away, into the woods again, until there was no sign of the roadblock; and then she crouched down again, and tried to work out where to go next.   


And she remembered, the memory swimming into the corners of her mind and taking up an uneasy residence there, that there was somewhere else she had been told that she needed to go.  


Robin Buckley knelt on the shores of an icy-cold lake, beneath a stand of silver birch trees, and tilted her head to listen.  


This was the place, she was sure of it. In objective time – if such a thing existed – a few days had already passed, and another one was haltingly progressing, but in her own personal timeframe, it had been no more than a few hours since she had walked through that strange dreamworld made of memories, arm in arm with an old friend of hers who had left and then died; and she remembered what Heather had told her.  


“ _This is where to look_ ,” Heather had said, in a voice that sounded like a hundred dead people whispering in harmony, and she had no other ideas left by this point, so here she was. She did not know quite what she was supposed to be looking for, but that almost seemed to be beside the point.  


It was very quiet here, down by the edge of Lovers’ Lake. There were no soldiers here, not yet. Just her, and the wind, and the waves breaking against the rocks that littered the beach.   


She looked again. One of them was not a rock at all; she vaguely remembered having registered this in the memories, in the Between, but for the most part, her mind had been on other matters than geology.  


She moved closer, tiptoeing towards it, as the cold waves lapped at the soles of her boots, and peered at the grey object. It was concrete, not stone, half-covered by sand and extending from the small sandy embankment at the back of the beach into the lake. Where the concrete met the water, there were strange ripples, and the water was darkened slightly, murky with some unknown substance.  


Robin took a step further into the lake, wincing as the cold water poured into her boots, and crouched down to stare at the object. It was some kind of water outlet, she could see now; the end of some kind of pipe or something, hollow and dark within, in a tunnel perhaps three feet in diameter.   


She shrugged in confusion. For the life of her, she had no idea precisely why the ghosts of the dead of Hawkins should want her to care about the municipal water supply. She briefly considered climbing into the pipe to find out – it was probably large enough if she went on her hands and knees, although she would be kneeling in ice-cold water – but decided against it, for a wide variety of reasons.  


And then there was a noise, just the faintest hint of a sound, from within. It sounded like splashing, and scraping, and beneath it all, something breathing.  


Robin leapt back as though she had been electrocuted, because she had seen enough horror movies and read enough Stephen King novels to hardwire the reflex into her. After all, a small part of her brain happily mused to itself, if any town in the country was going to have a monster crawling around its sewers, then it would surely be Hawkins.  


The noise came again, and this time, there was something else as well, like the sound of something being dragged across the floor, and it was distinctly moving in her direction. And there was a part of her that was scared, of course, but that part was rapidly being overwhelmed by the rest of her, which was not entirely unhappy with the idea of having some monster to fight; because Jasna had sacrificed herself to save Robin, had kissed her and had sacrificed herself, and had been taken away by one monster, and if there was another one beneath Hawkins, then Robin was not going to let it take anybody else.  


“Fuck off,” shouted Robin down the pipe. “You want to eat the children of this town? You want to play with our minds and strangle our society? Well, I’m Robin Buckley, and I’ll fuck you up, so you should probably just crawl right back into your Upside-Down hellhole and call it a day. You don’t want to fight me, because I’ve had one hell of a day already.”  


There was silence from in the pipe, and then – and whatever she had been expecting, this was not it – the faint and pained and muffled voice of Dustin Henderson replied, “Robin?”  


*******

White light.  


Darkness.  


Both.  


Neither.  


Somewhere in there, in the everything and the nothing, there was a mind, a sequence of thoughts, an intelligence.  


No, that wasn’t quite true, it knew; there was another one there with it as well, but that mind was nowhere to be seen, unless it was the whiteness and the darkness. And, quite frankly, that seemed like too much credit to be giving the other mind, so the first entity decided to assume that it was hiding somewhere.  


The mind considered the question of its own identity. With the mental equivalent of a shrug, it decided that masculine pronouns seemed to fit as well as anything else; but he could not remember his name, or any other details about himself, or exactly where he might be.  


He looked around, and saw that his surroundings were beginning to resolve into rough, blurred shapes and colours. There was blue to one side of him and green-grey to the other; and then that was gone, and there was something else, pale yellow and cream-coloured walls; and then that was replaced by a kaleidoscope of colours, which faded away in turn to be replaced itself.  


He looked down, and saw with a strange lack of concern that he did not have a body. This, in itself, was interesting in two ways; he had evidently expected to have one, so was able to draw the assumption that he was normally a corporeal being rather than the current disembodied mind that he appeared to be, but was apparently in a place where having a body was for some reason forbidden.  


And then the colours began to fade away, to leach out of his surroundings, and even as shapes swam into focus more and more, the darkness began to spread around him. He was in a room with wooden walls, tied to a chair despite his lack of a body. He was on a table in a room that was simultaneously bright with clinical light, but darkened and deadened in the way it felt. He was on a field, alone, as something moved towards him –  


And then he remembered, all in a flash, exactly where he was. He was still unsure as to the question of his own identity; but he knew, even more importantly than this, that he could not let this take place –  


He closed his eyes and focused, focused harder than he thought was within his power, on something else, anything else. He reached for the memories, and grabbed hold of the first one that came to hand.  


And he opened his eyes, and the light was back, darkened around the edges, but being held at bay for now. The world was green and yellow and concrete-grey, and he was standing in a playground in the last days of a summer that had gone away a long time ago.  


Before him stood a swingset, coloured in the kind of comforting red that only a child’s eyes could fully comprehend, and he walked towards it, and sat down. The darkness followed him, creeping sullenly around the corners of his vision; for a brief second, there was a flash of another scene, a darkened cinema screen, but then he was back on the swing again.  


And there was someone else there as well, now. It was not the other mind, he knew instinctively, even if he did not entirely know the reason for this certainty. In any case, it did not look like the Enemy, or even like the thing which wanted to become the Enemy. It looked like a six-year-old boy without a face.  


The faceless boy stood before him, and moved his head and body as though he was speaking, but no sound came out. In fact, he realised, there was no sound here at all, apart from a faint hissing white noise that had been present for the entire time.  


And then he was somewhere else, in a darkened world, but a subtly different kind of darkness to the kind that was crawling around the corners of his vision. He was running, dodging between trees, despite the fact that he was still completely without body or physical form; and all around him, strange grey shapes floated and fell like confetti in slow-motion, or like ash from a volcano.  


Another place, now, another place entirely. It was a crowded corridor, and it was full of children – older, perhaps thirteen or above – but none of them had faces either, and none of them were speaking, even as they jostled into one another and opened and closed their lockers and acted out the perfect mime of a school day.  


Somewhere else, now. A quiet road, in front of a car that was filled with boxes and packages. Before him stood a small group of faceless people, and they were hugging the people beside him, moving to hug him (or where his body would have been, at least), and – somehow – although they had no eyes, there were tears flowing down their blank and pristine heads.  


Somewhere else. A forest in the dark, with a fire burning at his back. And he felt another assault from the dark thing in his eyes, another stab of malice, and he knew that it was trying to win control of this place, just like the wooden room and the hospital bed and the field. And then, once it had won those, it would be able to take everywhere else as well, and the world beyond.  


He closed his eyes, and pushed with his will – and something about that seemed important on a different level – and then he was somewhere else, a safe place again, although this time it had been harder to break free of the dark thing.  


He was standing in a room in a house, and it seemed familiar, like he had been there before. There were six other people in the room with him, all faceless, and all looking at him. One of them was lying on the sofa, covered in impossible blood; another was leaning against the wall by the door; two more were sitting on the floor and gazing up at him.  


And he felt, and it was the strangest thing, that he had just done something massive and significant, for the whole atmosphere of this place seemed to be invested with deep meaning. He thought, idly, that there should have been a string orchestra playing, a tune climbing higher and higher; but it was silent.  


He knew this place. Why did he know this place?  


The dark thing moved as if to strike, but he batted it away, held it in place, because he was nearly there, nearly there –  


“Oh,” said Will Byers. “Now I remember.”  


*******

Nikolay Palenko opened his eyes in the real world, as the light of the Between faded away.  


He had always been particularly proud of his instincts – they had, after all, been a crucial skill in his line of work, when split-second decisions and survival reflexes were quite often the hinges upon which the success of a mission could turn – and they did not fail him here, for in that first second of consciousness, he noticed several things.  


The first thing was that he was lying on a rubble-covered floor, Kali stirring next to him (although of Terry there was no sign, as the woman had predicted), in a building that had possibly once been a particularly finely decorated medical practice or clinic of some description. The second was the corpses, which were everywhere around them; something indiscriminate had happened here, killing men in fine suits and doctors and cleaners alike, mostly through bullet wounds or through the falling rubble. But whatever it was, it was over now, or so it appeared; for there was only one sign of life here apart from the two of them, and that was the third thing.  


An unfamiliar man, bearded and bloodstained, stood silhouetted in the doorway of the building, looking back at them; and then he turned, and began to run. Nikolay did not exactly blame him, but did not think too much of it, because of the fourth thing.  


Martin Brenner was not there.  


They staggered to their feet, the pair of them; for although the journey through the Between had not involved any actual physical movement on their part, there was still a dull exhaustion lying over them. Nikolay realised, in a moment of surprise, that he had not properly slept since before they had stolen the plane from Ozerov’s camp, with nothing more than a snatched few minutes here and there whilst the plane was flying through the skies of the Shadow World.  


“Where is he?” said Kali. “We were supposed to be going to right where he was – is he one of the corpses?”  


Nikolay shook his head, and Kali nodded with the look of somebody who had known that they were not fortunate enough for this to be correct. “Somewhere in here, surely. Terry said it wouldn’t be an exact science.”  


“Well, get looking,” said Kali. Her voice was terse, and Nikolay did not take it personally.  


He walked, unsteadily, towards the lobby of this building, towards the door where the man had been standing. It was bright and sunny outside, and another realisation came to Nikolay; he had not seen the sun in months, since before the Americans had captured him in Neumann. He had been in the darkness of a cell, and then the darkness of the Klyuchi base, and then the darkness of a dead world with no sun and no accompanying universe. And now here it was, still shining as though he had never left it behind.  


He thought to himself, vaguely, that this was the sort of situation that would reduce some people to tears. Perhaps, if it were not for the pressure of the situation, then he would have done.  


He looked outside, onto the green lawn that stretched away from the building, and saw that there was something wrong. There, not too far away, by the edge of some kind of water tower, stood a crowd of people, perfectly and utterly still. Some were suspended in improbable positions that would surely have caused their takers to overbalance and fall; some were holding weapons of some description. Not one of them was moving the slightest muscle, as they stood there in the orange afternoon sun.  


He shook his head, and looked around, to see where Kali was. The young woman had gone in a different direction to him, into another room filled with computers and television screens, but there was apparently very little of interest in there.  


Nikolay stepped through the door, into the open air, and saw the dying woman on the steps in front of him.  


She was breathing, just. Her eyes were closed, and blood was running in a dark river from two neat bullet wounds in her lower abdomen, but there were still slow, rattling, breaths.  


“Kali,” said Nikolay, loud enough to be heard, “come here. Quick.”  


“What is it?” said Kali, emerging from the building.  


“There’s someone still alive,” said Nikolay. “But she’s injured. Help me get her somewhere safer, somewhere that I can help her.”  


“No time for that,” said Kali, and her voice was flat. “We need to find Brenner. That’s the priority.”  


“She’s dying,” said Nikolay, softly. “Come on.”  


Kali looked at him, and he saw the burning in her eyes. It had not gone away. “He could be getting away right now.”  


“Kali,” said Nikolay, “I told you. We’re not treating people this way. Not like obstacles, or objects. Help me.”  


Kali met his eyes for a second, and then snarled, and bent down to help Nikolay lift the dying woman. “Fine. But be quick.”  


They carried her into the building, and into the room with the television screens, where they laid her down on a table, raising her hips onto the cushions from the chairs to elevate the wounds above the level of her heart, and Nikolay took the opportunity to examine the wounds more closely. Neither of them appeared to have perforated any internal organs; one bullet had fractured the pelvis, or so it appeared from a cursory glance, whilst the other had passed through the muscle to the side of the woman’s kidneys. It was, perhaps, faintly possible that she could survive.  


He was cleaning the wounds – for he was somewhat at a loss for quite what else to do, in the absence of any real medical equipment to hand – when they heard the voice.  


It was coming from out in the lobby, half-muffled, as if from behind doors and rubble, and it sounded like the voice of a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen.  


“Mrs Byers?” came the voice. “Dr Vaudrais?”  


Nikolay froze, and slowly turned to look at Kali, who was standing similarly still, her hand resting on a heavy radio handset, gripping it like a potential weapon.  


“Mrs Byers?” came the voice again, and there was desperation in its tone. “Anyone? Mr Funshine? Mr Axel?”  


And, because Nikolay was looking at Kali, he saw the blood drain from her face in shock, and apparently alter the balance of her body by so doing, for she almost staggered backwards by a step.  


“What is it?” said Nikolay, but Kali ignored him, and blinked, and then strode out into the lobby, the radio handset in her hand, and Nikolay glanced helplessly at the unconscious woman, whose breaths were sporadic and pained, and then ran to follow.  


Picking her way over the bodies, over the rubble, at the very end of the corridor, there was a teenage girl, her hair an inconspicuous brown and her face stained with grease and oil and fear, a camera around her neck, and Kali marched towards her.  


“Who are you?” said the girl, guardedly, around two seconds before Kali reached her, and grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, and pinned her up against the wall.  


“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Nikolay, as he caught up with her. He grabbed Kali’s shoulder, and tried to pull her away from the girl, but she was not budging.  


“Tell me, and as quickly as you can,” hissed Kali into the girl’s face, “who you are, and how you know those names.”  


The girl was pale with fear, but there was a determination in her eyes as well, Nikolay saw. “Maria Glenny. That’s me. And I was calling for my friends, because everyone’s gone, and I don’t know what to do. Please can you stop strangling me?”  


Kali snarled, but loosened her grip slightly. “Funshine and Axel. How do you know them?”  


“I told you,” said the girl, “they’re my friends. Sort of. They came to protect us.”  


“From what?” asked Nikolay, aiming for a kindlier tone.  


“From the Vestige,” said Maria. “But they’ve all stopped, they’ve just frozen –”  


Kali shook her head, dismissively. “Why would Axel and Funshine protect you? Why would they care about you?”  


“Oh,” said Maria, “it wasn’t me that they came to help. It was my friend. They knew her, they said.”  


There was a short and anticipatory silence.  


“Your friend?” said Kali.  


Maria nodded, as much as she could. “El. El Hopper. But they always called her Jane.”  


Kali’s grip loosened, apparently somewhat involuntarily, and Maria slumped to the floor, clutching her neck in relief, and Nikolay stood absolutely still, while he tried to digest this latest revelation, that Jane Ives – Kali’s sister, the one other remaining experiment of Martin Brenner’s, the one that they had been desperately hoping to find throughout their whole long journey through the Shadow World – was here, in this town, in this hospital.  


“Jane,” whispered Kali, and her voice was completely impossible to read.  


“Where is she, Maria?” said Nikolay. “I promise you, we’re her friends as well. Kali is her sister. We just want to know where she is.”  


Maria’s eyes flashed with distrust, but she shrugged, and Nikolay noticed that she was biting the corner of her lip, in the manner of someone trying very hard to stay composed. “She saved me. She threw me out of the way, back down into the elevator shaft. She knew that she only had time to do one thing before they got her, and she saved me instead of herself.”  


“Where is she?” snarled Kali, and there was something new in her tone, which Nikolay remembered from the fall of Klyuchi, a burning, uncontrollable, helpless rage. “Who got her? Where is my sister?”  


“There was a man with scars on his face,” said Maria, softly, desperately, and Nikolay knew exactly who she meant, what had happened, why they had all ended up here. “He took her, him and his soldiers. He took her away. She’s gone. El’s gone.”  


*******

El opened her eyes, and regretted it.  


The light stabbed at her like a memory, because it was a very familiar shade of burning brightness. It was the colour that the lights had been for the first part of her life, the time in the Lab.  


And the memories stabbed at her like a light, because all at once, she remembered where she was, and what had happened, and what was surely going to happen to her now, for she was in the hands of Martin Brenner once again.  


She had saved Maria, without even thinking about it; a simple gesture of her hand, a simple flexing of her powers, and her friend had been pushed through the still-open hatch on the floor of the elevator, her fall cushioned at the last moment by another burst of El’s will. But that had been the work of her subconscious mind, a reflex action in the face of the man she had seen standing before her; and he had smiled when he saw her, the smile of a death mask, and he had whispered, “Hello, Eleven.” And then the soldiers beside him – why were there soldiers here, helping him at a time when the Vestige was swarming and spreading throughout the hospital and quite possibly the whole town? – had took her by the arm, and dragged her to the military helicopter waiting on the rooftop, and loaded her in, and evidently then tranquilised her, for that was the last thing that she remembered before now.  


She should have fought, for she was able to do that again. She should have run, for she knew that no good could come of being in the same place as Martin Brenner. But the shock, the fear, the memories, had washed over her and pinned her down, and in the moment it had taken to get her bearings back, the world had changed.  


The door opened. She had not realised that there was a door there. She had not devoted a great deal of attention to her surroundings in the slightest.  


“Hello, Eleven,” said Martin Brenner, climbing out of her memories and into the real world, to sit before her once again. “Welcome to your new home.”  


She said nothing, but stared contemptuously at him.  


“Please do not think of using your abilities to escape,” said Brenner, once it was clear that she was not going to reply. “If you should consider this an option worth pursuing, I would invite you to consider this.”  


She deliberately looked away from the picture that he produced from his inside pocket, but he moved it in front of her face anyway, and – before she could turn away again – she saw a photograph, clear and newly developed, of four people tied up in the back of a military vehicle. Lucas and Max. Nancy and Mike.  


“It should go without saying,” continued Brenner, “that any…disobedience on your part shall have consequences, not for yourself, but for them. Should you injure any of our guards, or escape, or try to smuggle any messages out, then they will be killed. I know that you understand me, because I know that you are an intelligent young child.”  


El said nothing, because there was very little that she could say in the face of this threat. Brenner had Mike. He had Max and Lucas and Nancy. He had a weapon at her throat, and one at all of theirs, and he would not hesitate to use it.  


“Now,” said Brenner, “you should get some rest. Do not exhaust yourself, for you have a number of tasks ahead of you in the coming days and weeks. You, Eleven, are going to become very important indeed, very soon.”  


She just stared at him, and hoped that her eyes conveyed every last bit of anger and contempt and disgust and every negative emotion she had ever learnt.  


“What,” said Brenner, smiling slightly wider with his mouth and not his eyes, “not a word for your Papa?”  


His smile hung in the air between them, and El could not leave it there.  


“You are not my father,” she said, emphasising each word of her sentence, and staring him in the eye.  


Brenner blinked, and then raised his eyebrows smoothly.  


“Perhaps not,” he said. “But the only other contenders to that title are dead now, Eleven. And maybe, some day soon, I’ll play you a little tape recording, a little interview, just to make it clear to you what the man whom you thought of as a father truly thought of you.”  


He stood, and turned his back, and walked to the door.  


“Eleven,” he said, without turning back to look at her, “please understand this. We are about to become great, and you will be a part of this. The most important part.”  


She slept, and thought of them. Her family, scattered and pursued to all corners of the world. Her friends, beaten and imprisoned and hurt. Mike.  


When she dreamed, she would drift into the Void, just to see them, but they only slipped away.  


Maybe hours passed. Maybe days. It was hard to tell in this place, in this room, in this prison.  


And then, eventually, the door opened again, and a soldier whose face was as blank and unimportant as the wall ushered her out, into a white corridor. They walked down it, and then down a staircase, and along another long corridor, and eventually they came into a room.  


The room contained a large table, oval in shape and made from a polished dark wood. Around it sat nine people, with one empty chair left, and the soldier pushed her towards it. She sat.  


To her right was Brenner, dressed in a pristine suit, who smiled paternally at her as she took her seat. She did not recognise any of the other men around the table – they were all men – apart from one of them, and the sight of him sent a stabbing hollowness into her heart just a little bit more; but Samuel Owens did not make eye contact with her, simply staring at the man (a man who looked faintly familiar, from television screens) who sat at the head of the table.  


“Let’s begin,” said the familiar-looking man, who wore a red tie beneath an old face. “And then we’ll try and be done before lunch, hey, gentlemen?”  


A friendly chuckle went around the table at those words, although neither Brenner nor Owens participated, both merely smiling politely.  


“Jack,” continued the man, “I understand that you had a few things that you wanted to say to everyone?”  


“Absolutely, Mr President,” said another man. His hair was short and blond, and his face was relaxed and handsome, and he wore a neatly ironed military uniform. “By now, I’m sure you all know about the events of late in Hawkins, Indiana.”  


Everyone nodded, and El felt her breath freeze within her lungs in fear, for this could not be good, could not be good at all –  


“Me and Sammy,” continued the man named Jack, gesturing carelessly in the direction of Owens, “we’ve got it all under control for now, don’t worry. The reports of anomalous activity there are quite right; the flow of time has become non-linear, and over a hundred small dimensional gateways have opened. I’ve stationed some of my best men in the town, to defend against any incursions from extradimensional entities, but I recommend extreme caution in dealing with this. Mr President, we could do with more soldiers there.”  


“Granted,” said the President. “What else have you got, Jack?”  


The man named Jack glanced at Owens for a moment, seemingly considering something, and then blinked his bright blue eyes and turned away. “Gentlemen, if I may. I’ve brought in a couple of guests today, as you can see. I’m sure that several of you have heard of Dr Martin Brenner before.”  


Brenner nodded to the table, his expression calm and poised. “I’m honoured to be here, Mr President. I know a few of you here, I believe –“ he stared flatly at Owens for a moment, his lip curled in faint disgust – “and I know the rest of you by reputation. It’s a privilege to be able to present my work before such an esteemed audience, and I am of course grateful to Mr Beeching for giving me the chance to do so.”  


“Your work?” said another man, dressed in a pale grey suit. “You mean –“  


“Yes,” said Brenner. “MK Ultra. I am happy to report success far beyond what was initially expected.”  


“Hence the girl,” said another man, who was smoking a cigarette.   


“Indeed,” said Brenner, with a sharp nod. “This is Subject Eleven. She will now give you a demonstration of her abilities.”  


And then all eyes in the room were on El, and she felt another chill run through her as she looked at them, at the sharklike stares behind affable smiles.  


“Who are you?” she said, because it was all that she could think of to say.  


The President chuckled. “My name’s Ronald Reagan, sweetheart. I’m, well, the President of the United States. As for everyone else here – well, their names don’t really matter that much, but let’s just say that there’s a lot of movers and shakers in this room.”  


“The uncrowned King of Ansted,” said the man in the grey suit, casting a glare at Beeching.  


“The most refined sovereign of the Sovereign Group,” replied Beeching, returning the glare with a smile. “The chair of Blackwell Minerals over there; the editor-in-chief of Jackson News Media over there. The Lord High Inquisitor of the Central Intelligence Agency; the American envoy to and from the Syndicate of Interested Parties. And Sammy, of course, our kindly friend in the Department of Energy. The director of power and light across our land.”  


“Their identities are irrelevant,” said Brenner, turning to El. “Subject Eleven, please demonstrate your powers on…let us say, this table.”  


El did not move, did not act.  


“If you require motivation,” said Brenner, in a low voice, “perhaps you should think of your friends.”  


“What was the name that you mentioned to me earlier, Sammy?” said Beeching, smiling. “The boyfriend? The Achilles heel?”  


El realised, just a moment before the words hit her, what Owens was going to say.  


“Mike,” he said, quietly, still not looking at her. “Mike Wheeler. You know this, Jack. We both know that you remembered the name, from when you kidnapped him back in January.”  


“Well,” said Beeching, with a shrug, “do it for Mike, then, Miss Eleven.”  


And she lifted the table, and she moved the chairs around, for them. She relayed the secret message from the next room over, and told the President what his opposite number in Moscow was doing at that time (reading pages of economic statistics in a dimly-lit room and sighing heavily, as it turned out). She turned the lights off, and turned them back on again, and danced for the crowd, because they had her friends.  


“Impressive,” said the man in the grey suit, once all of this was finished. “Most impressive, Dr Brenner. But what do you want from us?”  


“It’s quite simple, Mr O’Grady,” said Brenner. “I simply seek the approval of the government of the United States – by which I mean your approval – for the extension of Project MK Ultra.”  


“Well,” said the President, “that goes without saying, Martin. How far?”  


Brenner appeared almost surprised by the swiftness of this response, but rallied quickly. “I believe that there are at least ten installations in the country that can be quickly repurposed for the sort of work this would involve. As for capacity, the necessary genetic factors provide certain limitations –“   


The man in the grey suit shook his head. “Not as much as you’d think, Dr Brenner. An operative of ours in Hawkins has been conducting research based on your surviving notes, and believes that he may have found a way to synthesise the correct chemicals and hormones, thereby inducing…psychic powers more frequently. He would be prepared to share this work, if the Sovereign Group were to be given some share of influence over the project.”  


“Agreed,” said Brenner immediately, and El noticed, out of the corner of her eye, a flash of surprise across Beeching’s face. “If this proves successful, then, I would estimate that we might be able to begin work on at least twenty-five new subjects at each installation per year even before we begin enlarging these facilities, although it will be several years before we see results.”  


“So,” said the President, somewhat slowly, “twenty-five per year, at ten installations. Two hundred and fifty psychics every year. A thousand every Presidential term.”  


“Yes, Mr President,” said Brenner.  


The President smiled jovially. “Well, that certainly gets my vote. Who knows, gentlemen, maybe the Cold War will be over by the time I’m out of office. Now that’d be something for George to talk about on the campaign trail.”  


Again, an easy chuckle passed around the room.  


“All in favour of pursuing Dr Brenner’s plan?” said Ronald Reagan. “Of opening ten new installations – subject to further enlargement – and providing an intake of twenty-five new subjects at each per year?”  


Six hands raised into the air, followed – smiling – by the President’s own hand. Brenner did not move – El assumed that he did not have a vote in this place – and nor did Owens, who kept his hands firmly fixed on the table.  


“Sam?” said the President.  


“I think I’ve made my objections to this project clear before, Mr President,” said Owens, his voice still somewhat quiet. “I can’t vote for this.”  


The President shrugged, and turned away from him. “Well, no matter. I think this is fairly conclusive anyway.”  


*******

The doorbell rang on the twenty-third hour of the neverending afternoon.  


“Mom,” said Holly, quietly, for she was worn out, “there’s a man at the door.”  


Karen looked up, and saw the silhouette against the frosted glass, tall and broad. “You’re right, Holly, dear. Mommy’s going to go and see who it might be.”  


“I think it’s the mailman,” declared Holly.  


“Why’s that, darling?” said Karen, standing, and feeling her head protest. The headaches had been troubling her all day – for all of this impossibly long day – and normally she would have dealt with this by pouring herself a bottle of wine from the fridge, just to calm herself down a bit, but she remembered quite hazily from the previous night that she had agreed with Nancy that she was possibly indulging herself a little bit too much there.  


Holly shrugged. “I don’t know. I just do.”  


Karen strolled slowly to the door, opening it a few seconds after the second ring came, and saw a strangely familiar man in a dirty police uniform standing on the other side.  


“Oh!” she said, in slight surprise. “I’m sorry; I don’t think we’ve actually met yet. You’re Chief Waxham, aren’t you?”  


The man – Waxham – nodded, smiling slightly. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Please, just call me Chief.”  


“Do come in,” said Karen, stepping back, and wondering exactly why the Chief of Police was paying her a visit. “Holly, darling, this is Mr Waxham. He’s the new leader of the policemen in Hawkins.”  


“Pleasure to meet you too,” said Waxham gravely, tipping his hat and bowing slightly to Holly, who giggled. “Mrs Wheeler, I don’t suppose I could have a word with you, now, could I?”  


“Absolutely,” said Karen. “Holly, darling, do you want to go and play in your room for a little bit? I’m afraid it’s going to be terribly boring down here.”  


Holly shrugged again – she was getting that gesture from Michael, Karen would swear – and ambled away to the stairs, climbing them slowly but two at a time, just to prove that she could.  


“I presume that this is about…” said Karen, and then trailed off, gesticulating vaguely at the still-sunny sky outside. For it did not make sense – days were not as long as that, not unless you were in the Arctic Circle or something – but at least it made no sense in a reassuring, obvious way, which the proper authorities would have surely noticed.  


“That’s certainly part of it,” said Waxham, smiling again. “Quite frankly, Mrs Wheeler, we’re just as in the dark – as it were – as you are. There’s people looking into it, though, and it’s been suggested that this is the result of some unusual solar activity. Flares and the like.”  


This did not sound particularly realistic to Karen, but she did not feel that it was entirely her duty to be supplying an alternative explanation, so she smiled and nodded slightly.  


“You might have noticed that the telephone lines have all gone down,” continued Waxham, “and power to quite a lot of houses. That’s perfectly normal, and, again, something that we’re working on.”  


“Well,” said Karen, wondering again why Waxham looked so oddly familiar, when she was quite sure that she had never met the Chief of Police since poor Jim had died, “I’m very grateful that you came round to reassure me in person. You must be working very hard, if you’re trying to get around the whole town.”  


“That’s not the only reason I’m here, Mrs Wheeler,” said Waxham. “I’ve got a few questions to ask about your two oldest children, if that’s alright.”  


Karen sighed slightly. “Oh dear. Have they been causing trouble again?”  


“Your son Michael was attacked last night,” said Waxham, and Karen felt a sharp jolt of something run through her, a heady mixture of concern and anger which dispelled her headache immediately. “I found him, covered in blood, out by the old mall. We’ve got it on the reports as some schoolyard rivalry.”  


Karen said nothing for a second, trying to frame a sentence, and then stuttered out, “Is – is he alright?”  


Waxham blinked, and then nodded. “Badly scarred, but he was still half-conscious when I picked him up. Powell said he’d put him on some painkillers.”  


“Where is he now?” said Karen, urgently. “It’s been a whole day –“ (and she was not entirely sure about this, because days were not supposed to be twenty-three hours long before any hint of evening, and in any case there had been those two moments of deep darkness, which had seemed like a cloud passing over the sun, but had lasted longer and been far darker than any cloud) – “and he’s been at the police station all this time?”  


“Listen,” said Waxham, “that’s not the important thing here. Where’s your daughter?”  


“I just sent her upstairs,” said Karen, with the world seeming to be spinning around her, daring her to try and make some sense of it.  


Anger flashed, momentarily, in Waxham’s eyes. “Your eldest. Nancy.”  


“She was here last night,” said Karen, slowly, “but she was gone by the time that I woke up. I assumed that she’d gone to see a friend or something. She might have said something along those lines last night. I don’t entirely recall.”  


“It’s important,” said Waxham, all the friendliness gone from his voice now. “Mrs Wheeler, I need to question your daughter about…certain things.”  


“What things?” demanded Karen. “If you can ask her, you can ask me. What do you want with my daughter?”  


Waxham blinked again, rubbing some of the strange ashy dust from his face as he did. “I have reason to believe that your daughter might have some connection to an incident last night, at the old mall. There was a break-in, and an attempted theft of some extremely important items and files. And she’s been behaving somewhat…oddly lately, so I’m told. Asking people around town about ghosts, and their traumas, and other such stuff. I just want to talk to her.”  


“Well,” said Karen, “I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry.”  


Waxham stared at her. “I don’t believe you.”  


“No,” said Karen, just as flatly. “I’m sure you don’t. Because even if I did know, Mr Waxham, I’m not sure that I’d be inclined to tell you.”  


A silence fell, as they stared at one another; and then Karen realised.  


“I have met you before,” she said, because she hated silences. “Around three years ago, in Indianapolis. I’ve got a very good memory for faces. Do you remember?”  


Waxham said nothing.  


“But you weren’t a police officer back then,” she said, and she was not entirely sure exactly why she was talking, why this would help, but Waxham looked almost rattled, somehow. “You were a…something. An analyst, or some word like that, some job title that doesn’t mean very much to anyone else. It was at a work function of Ted’s.”  


Waxham remained silent, and Karen was sure, now, that she had not imagined the look in his eyes.  


“Sovereign Banking was holding a big event of some kind,” she said. “Ted brought me along, of course, because that was the done thing. We found a babysitter for the children. And somewhere in the socialising, the networking, the whole rigmarole, we chatted to you briefly. Some high-ranking man in Sovereign from Washington, come out to the sticks to check up on things.”  


Karen smiled, and leaned forwards.   


“You’re not a policeman, Mr Waxham,” she said, with a slight triumph in her voice. “You’re a banker. You work for the same company that my husband does. And I’m very interested to know what you’re doing here, pretending otherwise.”   


Waxham remained completely motionless, but she could see the cogs turning in his eyes.  


“Well?” she said.  


And Waxham shrugged, just like Holly did, just like Michael did, and reached into his coat pocket, and pulled something out.  


Karen was not sure what significance the old handkerchief in his hand might hold, until he had pressed it over her face, and by then, as the chloroform entered her lungs, it was far too late to do anything.  


*******

“I am not afraid of you these days,” said Will Byers to the shadow at the corners of his eyes.  


It curled, and writhed, and struggled against the grip of his mind, but he was too strong; he was not going to let it go.  


“What,” Will continued, “you thought that I was just going to sacrifice myself to you without any kind of a fight? You thought I was just going to let you win?”  


The Vestige said nothing, but the landscape around them changed, and now Will was standing on that darkened street again, with El lying unconscious on the floor and Josh standing with a knife to his throat and their rescuers nowhere to be seen at all.  


“Yeah,” said Will. “Maybe then. But things change. Someone told me that there was no sense in sacrificing myself to save the world, because it wasn’t like you were going to leave the world alone once you had me. Giving you my memories would only make you stronger, more of a threat. And you really should have been paying attention, because you should know that there is absolutely no way that I’m going to let that happen.”  


The scene around them shifted again, and now Will was back in the old house, as though it had never been destroyed many times over, and his father was standing over him.  


“You are within our power now,” said Lonnie Byers in the voice of the Vestige. “You are within our mind, and there is no escape. Sooner or later, Will Byers, you will belong to us.”  


“I might be in your mind,” said Will, “but these are my memories that we’re standing in. You don’t have anything in the way of memories to populate this world, this place with. You’re empty inside.”  


Lonnie tilted his head to one side. “Soon we will have your memories, of the world, and of Us. We will come to remember what it was like, what it meant, to be Us, to bestride the world like a god, to reshape it in our image. We will become Us again.”  


“But you don’t know how, or why,” said Will. “Here’s the thing. You want to know what you are? I’ll tell you: you are the smallest fragment of a bad memory, the tiniest piece of a much greater darkness. You’ve come back to life, of course – because bad dreams, traumas, always do that, they don’t leave unless you make them – and now you want to run the whole performance all over again, to do exactly the same as He did before.”  


“Yes,” said Lonnie, said the Vestige. “We must remember. We must repeat. This is our purpose.”  


“And who gave you that purpose?” said Will. “Why are you doing the things that you’re doing?”  


“It is inherent within our nature,” said the Vestige. “It is the thing that makes us a part of Us. It is why we are here in this pitiful town, why we are awake.”  


Will was silent for a moment, and then he looked Lonnie in the deadened eyes, and laughed. “Seriously?”  


The Vestige said nothing.  


“You want to remember,” Will continued, “but you don’t learn, do you? You haven’t made any kind of progress there, have you?”  


“What are you talking about?” snarled the Vestige.  


“You want to conquer this town and this world,” said Will. “And you want to conquer me. Didn’t you ever think that you should try and do a bit of research first?”  


Lonnie blinked.  


“I am very prepared,” said Will Byers, “to die, if it means that it will stop you. I am very prepared to sacrifice myself for my friends, if it will actually work. And I am very prepared – and you should really know this by now – to do whatever it takes to bring you down.”  


“But there is nothing that you can do,” said the Vestige, smiling hungrily. “You are in our mind. And we are in your memories.”  


“Yeah,” said Will. “I know.”  


“Bit by bit,” said the Vestige, “piece by piece, we will conquer you, Will Byers. Every last moment of your life, in time, will be open to Us, will be under our control. And when you are ours, then we will take the memory of the time that you received the blessing of Us, and we will learn what it means to be Us, and we will claim our identity at last.”  


“Yes,” said Will, and he allowed a note of exasperation to creep into his voice, just for effect, “I know all of this. I know your plan, your grand strategy, your little identity crisis. In fact – and I don’t think you’ve entirely realised this yet, and maybe you should have worked this out before now – I know more about you than you know about yourself.”  


There was a silence in that childhood room.  


“I remember the things that you have forgotten,” said Will. “I know how to hurt you. I know how to destroy you. And you should know that if I’m in your mind right now, then it’s because this is where I want to be for precisely that purpose.”  


“You are bluffing,” said Lonnie, contemptuously.  


“That’s what you thought around fifteen minutes ago,” said Will, “and then I crashed a car through the roof of your lair and rescued my brother. Do you think that you could stop underestimating me?”  


“Fine,” said the Vestige, mockingly, but its tone was not entirely certain, “what are you going to do to Us, little Will Byers?”  


“I’m glad you asked,” said Will, smiling. “You see, there’s a lot of things that I know about you; but this is just one of the basic ones. One of the things that even you know. I know that you like it cold.”  


“So what?” said the Vestige.  


“So,” said Will, and he held the memory in his head at the ready, and prayed silently that he was not about to make an enormous mistake, “I think that you should see this. I think that you should remember this.”  


And the scene changed, and Will was burning.  


*******

Erica Sinclair didn’t notice it when the soldiers came to town.  


Nobody burst into her middle-school classroom during an otherwise normal lesson in a day which resolutely refused to play by the laws of physics. There were no trucks and gunmen standing in the parking lot outside, when she wandered through it during lunchtime; and there was no need to hide, in a closet or otherwise, at any point, although there were moments when she considered doing just that in order to be away from all of the people.  


It was only later, some indeterminate and frankly irrelevant number of hours later, that she realised that her day had been unusual in its lack of these things.  


She saw the roadblock on the street as the crowd of middle-schoolers spilled out of the front doors of the school following the ringing of the bell, and tried to freeze in her tracks, but the crowd carried her onwards. It took a few more seconds for anyone else to notice – of course it did, thought Erica contemptuously, none of them had any reason to suspect that there would be something unusual going on; it wasn’t like they lived in Hawkins or anything – and when they did, a great excited muttering rose from the throng of children.  


Because they didn’t understand, Erica reminded herself, looking at the sea of white faces which were reddened in the winter air. They thought that a roadblock was a novelty, that a gun was a toy. They didn’t know. Not really.  


Somewhere behind her, someone was whispering to everyone within earshot, passing on the rumour. There had been soldiers at the high school, said the rumour; they’d rounded up some of the students, charged them with terrorism, taken them away. Maybe someone was dead there. Maybe there was a bomb in the school. Nobody knew, but everyone had opinions.  


And yet they kept walking, the whole crowd, and Erica Sinclair along with them, towards the roadblock, and there was nothing she could do, nowhere she could run.  


There were three soldiers at the roadblock that covered the intersection of Park Avenue and Main Street, and they were fully armed, their guns not too different from the one she had shot Neil Hargrove with earlier that day. Erica tried to duck down behind some taller people, to make herself look inconspicuous, just in case; and then she realised that if she looked like she was trying to hide, they’d be a lot more suspicious of her than if she was just another anonymous schoolgirl, so she straightened up again, and stared in the general direction of the soldiers without meeting their eyes.  


But they did not care, as it turned out. They just waved the children through, boredom clearly showing on their faces; and the minute that the crowd had begun to disperse on the other side, Erica strode away as quickly as she dared, away from the soldiers and the idiots and everyone, finding an alleyway between houses and darting down that, not entirely knowing where she was heading to apart from ‘somewhere else’.  


As she went, she noticed a dim red light through the slats of the wooden fence to her left, and peered through the crack to see what it was, but it was only another Gate, and so she kept walking.  


*******

There, on that quiet beach, under the distant too-high sun, they collapsed onto the sand, Dustin and Steve and Robin.  


“How did you know?” rasped Steve, eventually. His eyes were closed, and his breaths were still quick and panicked, but the flow of blood seemed at the very least to have slowed, to Dustin’s admittedly inexpert eyes.  


“Where to find you?” said Robin. Her voice was quiet as well; it seemed to be something of a theme.  


Dustin nodded, and stared out at the still waters of Lovers’ Lake, a pale blue against the green forests beyond.  


“Well,” Robin began, and then – oddly – chuckled slightly. “Put it this way, guys, you’ve missed quite a lot.”  


“Not going anywhere,” said Steve, his voice half-muffled against the coat that Dustin had wrapped around him.  


Robin tilted her head in acknowledgement. “Alright then. Nancy persuaded me to go to the old Holloway house, because it was haunted. Like, actually haunted. And then Heather took me away into this weird ghost dimension or something, made out of my memories, which frankly I still don’t entirely follow, but never mind. She tormented me for a bit, until I actually finally made peace with my memories of her – you know, the Secret and everything – and then she let me go. And she said that I’d need to come here at some point, because we were outside time or something weird like that; so I did.”  


“Didn’t have anything better to do?” said Steve.  


Robin paused, and Dustin noticed her face for the first time, pale not just with the cold, but with something like fear. “I didn’t know what else to do. Where else to go. They…they took everyone else. Everyone apart from me. They’re gone.”  


“They?” said Dustin, and he was surprised by how quiet his voice was.  


“Soldiers,” said Robin. “They came to the school. We destroyed this tower in the Upside-Down, shut the ghosts all down; and just when we thought that we’d won, they arrested everyone. I don’t know what happened to them. But they’re gone.”  


“Shit,” murmured Steve, sitting up, and then hissing with pain and lowering himself back to the floor again. “It’s Beeching. It must be. He said that it wasn’t over, didn’t he?”  


Robin nodded. “And there’s portals to the Upside-Down everywhere now, as well. Me and Nancy went through one at the school to blow the tower up, but there’s more, so many more.”  


“Yeah,” said Steve, “that might have been us. Sorry.”  


“What the hell did you do?” said Robin.  


“We went to the Lab,” said Dustin, “and then to the Russian base. And there was a fight, and the Chief tried to kill us, and the wall shattered, between here and the Upside-Down. He escaped. The ceiling collapsed. We had to find another way out.”  


His voice, a part of him was noticing, was so utterly dispassionate, he might as well have been reading a list of random sentences; and Robin seemed to notice as well, for she turned towards him with sympathy in her eyes.  


“What is it, kiddo?” she said.  


Dustin half-smiled. “Not what you call me. And nothing.”  


“I’ll call you what I want,” said Robin, smiling in return. “What happened?”  


Dustin fell silent, trying to put his thoughts in some sort of order, but when he spoke, he did not say what he had expected to say. “They’re never going to stop.”  


“Who?” said Steve.  


“Them,” said Dustin, gesturing vaguely in the direction of Hawkins. “Waxham. Beeching. The Upside-Down. Everyone. This is never going to end, until the world is destroyed.”  


“What do you mean?” said Robin, but there was something in her eyes that made it seem like she already knew.  


“Down there, in the base,” said Dustin, “there was a laboratory. Waxham was running it, it turned out. He was trying to synthesise chemicals, complicated amino acids, because he’d worked out that those were the ones in El’s brain. He was trying to make more psychics, and he was doing it because he thought he could make a profit out of it.”  


Robin stared at him in shock, and opened her mouth to say something, but Dustin pre-empted her.  


“There’s more,” he said. “We met a spy down there as well, who told us that three or four different governments were paying him for the secrets of the Upside-Down and Brenner’s research and everything that they could get their hands on. And before that, there was Beeching, trying to find the same things out from Mike and Max – probably doing his own experiments, hence the Manticore in the woods that night – and before that, the Russians. And it’s never going to stop. There will always be people trying to do the same thing, to make the same steps and open the same gates. Because nobody really thinks that they’re going to be the ones who make a mistake, who destroy the world. But somebody will, eventually.”  


A silence fell over the cold beach where the three of them were lying.  


“Well,” said Steve eventually, and his voice was still weak, but forceful nonetheless, “we’d better stop them, then.”  


“You think we can?” said Dustin, only half in sarcasm. “You were saying that you were about to die, like, ten minutes ago at most.”  


“Don’t you ever get tired of being dramatic?” said Robin to Steve. “It’s actually a genuine question, Harrington. Ever?”  


Steve ignored her. “Look. Point is. If they’ve taken everyone else, then we’re the only ones left who can stop them. Beeching, the Mine Flayer, whoever. Everyone. That’s what we do.”  


“God, you sound like Nancy,” said Robin, but she was smiling slightly.   


“I’m not giving up,” said Steve. “Like you said, Henderson, down in the tunnels down there. We’ve still got things to do.”  


“Steve’s right,” said Robin, and grimaced as she said it. “God, that was weird to say. But he is. We’ve got people to fight for.”  


“True,” said Dustin, neutrally. “We do.”  


“Nancy and Jonathan,” said Steve. “Mike and Lucas and Will and El and Max and even Erica, if we have to. Suzie, Dustin, think about Suzie. They need us.”  


“Jasna,” said Robin, very quietly.  


Steve peered up at her, over the edge of his coat. “Who’s Jasna?”  


“Nobody,” said Robin, somewhat quickly. “Well. Somebody. Nancy’s lodger from Washington. Our fellow ghostbuster. Someone who helped us. Doesn’t matter. Just someone else to fight for.”  


Dustin glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, and noticed that her face was significantly redder now, and – from some wholly unexpected corner of his mind – felt a sort of amused comprehension overtake him. “Do you like her?”  


“Oh, my goodness,” said Steve, the glee in his tone managing to drown out the pain. “You do, don’t you, Rob?”  


“Oh, shut up, both of you,” said Robin, rolling over onto her front and facing downwards. “Just someone else to fight for. That’s all.”  


“You totally do like her, though, right?” said Dustin, allowing himself to grin.  


“I said shut up, kiddo,” Robin muttered into the sand, and then she rolled back over and sat up. “She kissed me. Before they took her away.”  


Steve and Dustin’s shouts of amazement, somehow, managed to drown one another out, and Robin rolled her eyes fondly.   


“Was it good?” said Dustin. “Like, I mean –“  


“Well,” said Robin, somewhat sharply, “she then went and sacrificed herself to the soldiers who were looking for me, and got dragged away to god-knows-where. So, you know, it was sort of difficult to know what to focus on.”  


“But –“ began Steve.  


“I guess,” Robin continued, biting her lip slightly, “you know, I guess I should probably try again at some point. Just to get a clearer impression.”  


“For science,” said Dustin, smirking. And he remembered, as the words left his mouth, about the laboratory down below the earth, about the scientists who experimented on children and tore open gateways to worlds full of monsters; but then he blinked, and gritted his teeth, and remembered something else as well, thought about a silent hilltop bright with the light of a distant main-sequence yellow star, thought about secret messages written on the fabric of reality. And he pushed himself to his feet, because perhaps it was true that the bad men were never going to stop; but nor was he, because there were people to protect.  


“For science,” Robin echoed, smiling herself, and she stood too, and pulled Steve inelegantly to his feet.  


They looked at one another, each waiting for one of the others to make the first move.  


“So,” said Steve, eventually, “now what?”  


“Now,” said Dustin, shaking the sand from his hair, and pushing his cap back onto his head, “we work out how we’re going to _win_.”  


*******

Josh Bateyi stood on another beach, and watched as the ring of people around him froze in place, and Will with them.  


He was gone; this much was obvious. Although the body was there, the mind had gone somewhere else, consumed and subsumed by the Vestige, deep beneath the dark waters of an alien consciousness. And Josh had no idea what to do about this, because Will had told them to trust him, to remember him (and those had sounded awfully like last words), and he didn’t know what it was that he needed to trust.  


Jonathan was lying on the floor now, his breaths coming sharp and fast into the whistle of the wind, and his eyes were closed.  


“Jonathan?” said Josh, sinking to his knees next to the older boy. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”  


In a small motion, Jonathan shook his head. “No. And no.”  


“He had a plan,” said Josh, and heard the hollowness of the words in his mouth. “He must have had a plan. I heard it in his voice. I swear I heard it.”  


“It won’t help,” said Jonathan, quietly.  


“You don’t know that,” said Josh.  


Jonathan pushed himself up, slowly, supporting himself on his elbows. “You don’t know, Josh. You don’t know what it’s like in there, inside its mind. I was only halfway when you found me, and even that was agony, torture. He won’t last.”  


“He had a plan,” repeated Josh, but the words tasted like ash now.  


A minute passed. The waves continued to crash against the shoreline, and the figures continued to not move in any discernible way.  


“What do we do?” said Josh, eventually.  


Jonathan shook his head again. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to help him.”  


“No,” agreed Josh, “or how to ask him what he wanted us to do.”  


“I know what he wanted,” said Jonathan, a hint of fond irritation in his voice, although it was still mostly dead in its tone. “He wanted to save us. He wanted to make sure that we were alright, and weren’t going to get hurt.”  


“But giving his memories to the Vestige wouldn’t achieve that,” said Josh. “I told him, last night. It won’t spare us, spare anyone. That isn’t how it works. If he gives away his memories, then everyone dies.”  


“But he did it anyway,” said Jonathan. “Why?”  


“There wasn’t another way out,” said Josh. “But he still had the gun from before, the one we found in the car. He could have…”  


The unspoken words passed between them; they both knew what Will could have done, in extremis, and neither of them doubted that he would have done it if it meant the salvation of the world.  


“Maybe he wanted us to run,” suggested Jonathan. “A diversion, to give us time to get away. Maybe he thought that we’d be able to defeat the Vestige, the Mind Flayer, whatever it would become, if we just had time.”  


Josh shook his head. “You can’t walk at the moment, let alone run. He’d have known that.”  


Jonathan tilted his head in acknowledgement.  


“Which means that there’s only one thing that he could be planning,” Josh continued. “He’s going to try and kill it from inside. I don’t know how, although, if I’m being honest, I only understand around a third of all this anyway.”  


Jonathan, slowly, nodded. “Yes. Destroy it from within. His memories, maybe, or something like that. The kind of plan that makes sense if you’ve spent your formative years playing D&D. Even if he can’t get out, finds himself trapped inside it while it dies, he’d still do it.”   


“Will it work?”  


Jonathan only shrugged, and closed his eyes again.  


“It’s still inside you, isn’t it?” said Josh. “Sorry. But it hasn’t let you go. Not entirely.”  


“I think it’s been there for a long time,” said Jonathan, quietly. “Chipping away. Eroding.”  


“Are you alright?” said Josh again.  


“No,” said Jonathan. “Not really. It’s going to kill me, eventually. I know that.”  


Josh gritted his teeth slightly, and turned to look again at Will. He was motionless – of course he was motionless, Josh thought; that would have been far too simple if he’d just stood up and announced happily that everything was fixed now – and his face was so utterly composed as he looked at the Vestige, so perfectly calm and serene.  


And Josh wondered to himself whether he would be the same, when death came for him; whether he would be able to face it with Will’s serenity, his acceptance. His mother had been the same as well; on that night – the one engraved into Josh’s memory like a canyon through a continent – she had been calm, accepting. She had stood in front of the soldiers without bowing her head, and when they had demanded to know where she was going in a mocking Turkish, she had replied in Kurdish and had smiled defiantly, before they shot her. She had been brave, before the end; and Josh hoped that it was a genetic trait of some kind.   


Because it would be soon, most probably. Perhaps Will would somehow manage to kill the Vestige; perhaps the whole situation here would resolve itself neatly and elegantly into an improbable happy ending. But that did not feel like it was how the real world worked, not really; and that was before considering the fact that the space-time continuum in the region of Indiana had chosen this moment to defy the laws of science and twist into insanity. And, of course, this was a mere Vestige that stood before them, around them; a Vestige of a much greater, more terrifying, whole. Will had told them the stories about the Mind Flayer, and if a tiny amnesiac fragment of it was giving them this much trouble – was, quite possibly, currently killing Will – then Josh could only imagine the struggle that the real thing would be.  


So he would die soon, he thought; and maybe there would be a paradise on the other side of it, but that seemed too much like wishful thinking. The only paradises, Josh had always thought, were the ones that people imagined, because the real world was too messy for anything even remotely like perfection.  


And then he was pulled from his introspection, his reverie, by a pained sound from Jonathan.  


“What is it?” said Josh.  


Jonathan shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You should get out of here, now, while you still can.”  


“Erm, yeah, that’s not going to happen,” said Josh, slightly taken aback. “You think I’d leave you? Either of you?”  


“Josh,” said Jonathan, weakly, “it won’t be still for much longer. When it’s finished dealing with Will, then it’ll take me – it’ll be able to take me in a matter of seconds – and it’ll take you as well, if you’re not gone by then. It’ll give you its blessing, just like it said, and then you’ll be gone. Or submerged, at least, so deep that you won’t get out, only alive in order for it to raid your memories for tactical advantages, and that’ll be worse. You’ll see everything that happens, witness it as it spreads across the world, and you won’t be able to stop it. It won’t even let you die. So get away from here now, before any of that can happen.”  


“No,” said Josh.  


Jonathan’s face curled into a kind of snarl. “Are you not listening? What part of this don’t you understand?”  


“The part where I abandon you,” said Josh. “The part where I abandon him.”  


“You’re no good to either of us here,” said Jonathan.  


And the idea came to Josh, and it was terrifying from the moment it entered his mind, and yet curiously welcoming in its totality. “You don’t know that.”  


Jonathan blinked in confusion. “What do you mean?”  


“Maybe I might be able to help,” said Josh. “Just maybe. We don’t know for sure.”  


“How?”  


Josh’s eyes flickered, just for a moment, towards Will. “Put it this way. I’m willing to take the risk.”  


Jonathan said nothing for a moment, and then opened his eyes, squinting against the late afternoon sun towards Josh. “Are you sure?”  


“Yes,” said Josh. “I love him.”  


Jonathan closed his eyes again, and nodded. “I know you do.”  


“And I’m sorry,” said Josh. “For this. Honestly.”  


Jonathan gritted his teeth slightly, and forced his eyes back open. “Alright.”  


Josh took a deep breath, and paused, and then forced himself to start speaking. “It’s your fault, you know. All of this.”  


Jonathan said nothing.  


“You failed Will,” continued Josh. “You were supposed to protect him, to defend him. That’s the whole thing about being a big brother. But you didn’t help, you didn’t stop them. The Vestige drove us all apart, and destroyed your home, and you let them take you away, without a fight. You made Will come to your rescue when you got yourself into that mess, under the tree. And now they’ve taken him, consumed him, your own brother. The one person who needed your help, he didn’t get it. This is your fault, Jonathan. Everything that happens to Winterton, to the world, to Will; that’s on you.”  


And Josh saw it; the faintest movement in Jonathan’s face, the faintest crumpling, as he gave way under the weight of Josh’s words, his accusations. There were tears on his face again, although he was making no sound; and then he blinked, to try and dislodge the tears, and when he opened his eyes again, they were blank and empty, and Jonathan Byers was not there any more.  


And the newest member of the Vestige, slowly, shakily, rose to his feet; and as he turned his back on the sea, there was someone standing directly in front of him.  


“Come on, then,” said Josh. “Give me your blessing. Do it.”  


The Vestige did not hesitate, as it raised Jonathan’s arms towards Josh’s head, and just before they made contact, their eyes met.  


“I’m sorry,” whispered Josh, and it might have just been his imagination, but he thought that Jonathan’s face acknowledged it somehow, in the smallest of motions; but then the Vestige’s fingertips met Josh’s temples, and the whole beach was gone, and the body of Jonathan Byers with it.  


And Josh was falling, falling from a great height in an unfamiliar place, and below him – distant miles below him, and yet surely only a few feet at most – was Will, hazy and insubstantial, and in the heart of that darkened room, he was surrounded by fire.  


*******

Joyce was lying there, mostly motionless, out on the desk, and Maria felt a deep shudder run down to her bones as she looked at the dying woman.  


There was still blood trickling from the wounds, although – by the looks of it – the flow had been significantly greater at some point recently. Maria could hear that she was still breathing, but it was not the breath of a healthy person; she was rattling and gasping, once every five seconds or thereabouts, and although her eyes were closed, although she was clearly deep in unconsciousness, Maria could tell that whatever remained of Joyce Byers, she was feeling pain.  


“I’m sorry,” said the man beside her, in what sounded like a tone of genuine sympathy.   


Maria turned to look at the two people that had found her in the lobby, the ones who had seized and questioned her, and then just as quickly had let her go in response to her news. The ones who knew El. “Who are you?”  


“It doesn’t matter,” said the young woman, her tone curt.   


The man rolled his eyes slightly. “Come on. If she’s your sister’s friend, then we don’t need to treat her like an enemy.”  


“Some spy you are,” muttered the woman, narrowing her eyes in anger and turning away.  


The man ignored this. “My name’s Nikolay, and my friend is Kali. I don’t know if Jane – El, sorry – ever mentioned her sister –“  


Maria nodded, remembering. “Once, briefly. But how did you get here? Where were you during the battle; why didn’t the Vestige get you as well?”  


“It’s a long story,” said Nikolay, sounding weary.   


“And we don’t have time for it,” snapped Kali, spinning back to face Maria. “There’s more important things for us to be dealing with. The man that took Jane, namely. Martin Brenner.”  


Maria nodded, feeling a slight disorientation at the turn in the conversation.  


“How long ago was this?” demanded Kali.  


Maria shook her head slightly, trying to work out how long it had taken her to climb back through the hospital, through the motionless legion of the Vestige. “I don’t know. Five minutes? Maybe ten?”  


If anything, Kali looked more angry. “And where did he go?”   


Maria shook her head again. “I don’t know. I told you – sorry – El threw me out of harm’s way, out of this person’s reach, down the elevator shaft again. But he had soldiers, and they didn’t look like they’d been fighting the Vestige, so I think he must have come from somewhere else.”  


“Arrived in a helicopter, or a truck, or something,” murmured Nikolay, possibly just to himself. “And then he’d have left the same way he came, immediately. He’d got what he’d come here for.”  


Kali was very still for a moment, and then – quite calmly – she picked up the keyboard of the nearest computer, and hurled it against the wall with great force, her face twisting with silent rage, and when she spoke again, it was in the voice of someone only just managing to contain themselves. “So we missed him by minutes. Moments. And now he’s gone.”  


Nikolay nodded, staring into nothingness. His eyes looked haunted, somehow, Maria thought; like someone who had seen far more in the last few days than he had ever wanted to. She could understand.  


“He knew exactly where to find us,” said Maria, quietly, just in case this would help. “He was waiting. He must have had spies in the hospital, or something like that.”  


“Or the person who runs this hospital joined forces with him,” said Nikolay. “This is clearly a government establishment, after all, and the powers of –“  


But he was silenced, as Kali began to speak, her voice terrifyingly quiet and venomous. “It doesn’t matter. Do you get that, Palenko? It doesn’t matter how he found her, or who runs this hospital, or anything like that. What matters is that we almost caught him, almost stopped him, and we didn’t. And do you want to know why?”  


The room rang with silence. Maria wanted, very much, to be somewhere else; but this was the only place that there were living people left, it seemed, and she had no choice.  


“I’ll tell you,” Kali continued, still in that same quiet voice, somehow sharper and angrier than anything loud could have ever been. “It was because of you, Palenko. Because you saw a random person –“ she gestured dismissively at Joyce – “and made me help you carry her inside so that you could play doctor, regardless of the urgency of the situation. You let Brenner get away, let him go back to his experiments and laboratories, just because you wanted to be a good _fucking_ Samaritan. I thought that I could trust you, but you failed us. You failed Jane. You failed everyone back in Klyuchi, all your dead friends.”  


Nikolay’s face was slightly whiter now in shock, but he refused to break eye contact with Kali. “I told you that we weren’t letting innocents die. I won’t apologise for that.”  


“Good,” hissed Kali. “Because I wouldn’t accept that apology. We’re through, Palenko. This whole thing is over. You stay here, take up battlefield surgery or whatever you think is the appropriate response to the situation. In fact, do whatever you like; go back to Moscow if you want, or go back to spying on whatever it was that you got arrested for. I don’t care. I simply don’t care about you any more.”  


Nikolay was motionless for a moment, and then – in a slightly hesitant motion – he nodded, still not breaking eye contact. “If that’s what you want. But I’m not letting Brenner get away with this, to be clear. I’m not giving up, whatever you might think.”  


“I don’t care,” repeated Kali, and turned her back on Nikolay, and stalked towards the door.  


Maria watched her go, and then – without having planned to – she felt herself taking a shaky step after her. “Wait.”  


Kali stopped, and turned her head over her shoulder. “What?”  


“Where are you going?”  


“I’m going to find Brenner and kill him,” said Kali, flatly. “Obviously.”  


“Yeah,” said Maria, “but where?”  


Kali shrugged slightly. “He could be anywhere. But I know how he thinks; I know where he’d want to go. He likes things to make sense, to be neat. He’d want to take her to Hawkins.”  


Maria took a deep breath, and turned her next words over in her head a couple of times, before blurting them out in a somewhat uncontrolled fashion. “Can I come with you?”  


Kali blinked in surprise, and turned more fully to look at Maria, assessing her. “You don’t want to stay with that woman there, the one on the table? You said that you knew her, that she was a friend.”  


“She is,” said Maria. “And my dad’s downstairs, as well. Sort of.”  


Kali furrowed her eyebrows in confusion.  


“I don’t know if there’s anything left of him,” said Maria, quietly, and she tried her best to keep her voice level and steady, to prevent the tears, because then there would be no way that El’s terrifying sister would let her help. “I don’t think there is. The Vestige got him, and now they’ve all stopped, but the people inside haven’t come back. I think my dad might be dead.”  


“So why don’t you want to stay?” said Kali.  


“Because El isn’t dead yet,” said Maria, biting her lip. “She can still be saved.”  


“And you want to help me do that,” said Kali.   


Maria nodded. “I don’t think there’s very much that I can do, but –“  


Kali cut her off, raising her hand in a small but noticeable motion. “You can come. But you follow my commands. We’ll probably have to kill people. We might be killed ourselves. If you come with me, you forfeit any right to complain about any of this.” She was not looking at Nikolay, quite pointedly.  


Maria hesitated, and then nodded. “For El. If that’s what we have to do.”  


It was not a smile that crossed Kali’s face, not exactly. Smiles, Maria had always thought, were supposed to have some kind of happiness behind them.  


“Come on, then,” she said, vengeance and relish in her tone. “Let’s go to Hawkins.”  


And she strode away, and Maria began to follow, before remembering who was behind her, and turning to look at Joyce’s unmoving body.  


“It’s alright,” said Nikolay, quietly. “I’ll take care of her. I promise. If I can save her, if I can help her, I will.”  


“Thank you,” whispered Maria.  


Nikolay smiled ruefully.   


And Maria turned again, and ran to catch up with Kali, the camera at her neck swinging wildly, and as she ran, she whispered an apology to her father, down in the labyrinth below, and another one to El, wherever she might be. But the second one, at least, had the possibility of atonement, and that seemed like the most important thing right now to Maria.  


*******

With a click, the tape recorder started.  


“Please,” said Jack Beeching. “Have a seat.”  


Lucas sat, uneasily. Had the situation been slightly different, he would have stayed standing on point of principle, but he had been on the hard concrete floor of a small and darkened prison cell for some indeterminate number of hours by this point, and the small cushion on the chair across the desk from Beeching seemed too inviting to refuse.  


“I assume,” continued Beeching, smiling – he seemed, to Lucas, like the sort of person who was always smiling – “that you know why you’re here, Mr Sinclair.”  


“Yes,” said Lucas. “Yes, I know exactly why I’m here.”  


Beeching steepled his fingers, and leaned forwards slightly. “Mr Sinclair, the charges against you are rather severe. Where should we start? With the conspiracy to commit terrorist activities?”  


“You know what,” said Lucas, hearing the tiredness in his voice, “sure. Let’s start with that. Could you explain that to me a little?”  


Beeching leaned back in his chair again. It looked a lot more comfortable than the other one, Lucas reflected. “Mr Sinclair, you and Miss Mayfield spent Friday night constructing an elaborate series of deathtraps in the Hawkins junkyard, all of which seemed to be wired to a large petrol-bomb. There’s really no other way to explain that, if I’m being entirely honest.”  


“There is,” said Lucas. “If you actually care about this, at least. Me and Max were trying to trap the monster. You know, the one that you set loose back at Christmastime; the one that killed your soldiers on the night of the bus crash. We were trying to trap it and kill it, since you obviously weren’t bothering to try and do the same.”   


Beeching only shook his head slightly. “Mr Sinclair, that’s a flimsy excuse at best. And, indeed, it’s a bit concerning that you happen to know about the deaths of several loyal soldiers on the night of January 4th. That’s the sort of thing that several people might quite like to hear a bit more about your explanation for knowing.”  


“But not you, though,” said Lucas. “Not you. Because you know exactly what happened, just the same as me.”  


“Let’s move on,” said Beeching, ignoring Lucas’s words. “Let’s talk about the espionage, shall we? Mr Sinclair, I should tell you that we are aware of your connections to a certain Murray Bauman, your…recruiter, I suppose. Bauman is a known associate of several people who have been convicted of or suspected of spying for the Soviet Union on American soil; I could read you their names, if that were at all relevant to the situation at hand. Bauman was also involved, in a somewhat hazy capacity, with the Starcourt Incident of July 4th last year, as indeed were you and your friends back in custody. The links between you and Bauman are quite clear.”  


“Yeah,” said Lucas, feeling a slight wave of confidence in the wake of Beeching’s words, “all of that’s true. Obviously. But you’ve danced around the truth quite neatly there, haven’t you? There’s nothing I’m actually guilty of there; I’ve just spoken to someone who’s spoken to someone who’s been to Moscow on holiday before.”  


“And then, of course,” continued Beeching, “there’s the seditious material. We searched your locker at school when we apprehended you, and found large quantities of Marxist literature in your possession. These are books which call for revolution, Mr Sinclair, as I’m sure you’re aware.”  


“Well, yeah,” said Lucas. “Be a bit difficult not to pick up on that.”  


“Your books call for revolution,” repeated Beeching. His smile had not faded, but it was thinner now, sharper. “They call for insurrection against the so-called enemies of the working class, and against the state. They call for violence and destruction, the establishment of dictatorship and the abolition of religion and traditional family structures. They run contrary to every principle that the United States of America are founded upon, and they represent a direct attack upon the American way of life.”  


“Have you read them?” asked Lucas. “Any of them?”  


“Absolutely,” said Beeching, without hesitating. “One must know one’s enemy, after all.”  


“So you’re allowed to, but I’m not?”  


“That’s not as strong an argument as you seem to think it is, Mr Sinclair,” said Beeching, smiling in a faintly condescending tone. “It is not illegal to have read Marxist literature, and this is not what you are being accused of here. Rather, you were found in possession of this seditious material in a school environment, presumably with the hope of distributing it to your peers and radicalising them. You have been linked to a known associate of Soviet spies, and were present during a Soviet attack upon American soil, and have been building bombs with your girlfriend in the middle of the night, presumably as tools for your own personal attempt at the revolution described in these books. When all of these are put together, Mr Sinclair, I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for you.”  


“But again,” said Lucas, clenching his fist beneath the table in the hope that Beeching would not see him shaking slightly with apprehension, “there aren’t any real crimes for you to accuse me of here. You’re basing all of this on a few books.”  


“Books which are quite clear in their message,” said Beeching.  


“Books which don’t say what you seem to think they say,” said Lucas. “You say that they’re a direct attack on the United States; I don’t think there’s anything necessarily un-American about wanting to build a society that works for all of its members, or that helps to protect the poor and downtrodden from the powerful. ‘We, the people’, and all that. ‘Liberty and justice for all’. You say that they’re calling for insurrection against the enemies of the working class; you’re only accusing yourself by saying that.”  


“I see,” said Beeching, smiling with slightly more engagement now. “And the dictatorship you wish to set up? Is that an American principle as well, Mr Sinclair? Is that just what George Washington was aiming for?”  


“Well,” said Lucas, smiling in return, although his was more defiant than anything else, “regardless of what Washington wanted, that’s what we’ve got at the moment, isn’t it?”  


Beeching raised one eyebrow. “Are you not familiar with the Constitution? With the rule of law? With democracy?”  


“Absolutely,” said Lucas. “Are you?”  


Beeching nodded, not losing his smile. “You seek to argue, then, that there is no democracy in America when the government can take unilateral action to arrest those suspected of treason, in the hope of denying them a chance to fully enact their plans for revolution? You argue that there is no rule of law, when we take action against those attempting to break it?”  


“Not exactly,” said Lucas. “I’m saying that there’s no democracy in America when people are denied the vote through any means possible, and voters are suppressed, and elections are rigged. I’m saying that, no matter what George Washington thought he was doing with the Constitution – and I don’t think he had the best interests of people looking like me at heart, really – it’s got nothing to do with whether people in America have any actual real representation. And, yeah, I’m saying that the rule of law seems a bit illusory when there’s soldiers holding teenagers without charges, without lawyers, without anything like that.”  


“And so, in the face of an imperfect democracy,” said Beeching, “you would establish a dictatorship, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Tell me, how will that help your representation, Mr Sinclair?”  


“That’s the thing, though,” said Lucas. “If you’d read those books, you’d know that they don’t all say that dictatorship is the only answer. Socialism and democracy are not actually mutually exclusive. If the Constitution can accommodate a shadow government that imprisons innocent teenagers, and releases monsters, and experiments on children from birth – well, then, I think it can accommodate a government that helps the poor and disadvantaged. And if it can’t, then, frankly, what’s the point of it?”  


Beeching only shook his head, still smiling. “Revolutions are bloody affairs, Mr Sinclair. I’ve done my fair share of helping to put them down. Argentina, Nicaragua, Chile, many more. You can have all of the fine ideals in the world, but revolutions end with the guillotine and the gulag. It’s inevitable.”  


“But these days,” said Lucas, “here in America, we’ve got the lynching and the secret laboratory instead. Neither of those are going away without revolution, without change, because you won’t let them. It’s not in your interests; it doesn’t support your power. And, anyway, I don’t believe in inevitability. Not as long as there are people around.”  


There was a brief silence in the room.  


“But, come on,” said Lucas, eventually, “let’s be honest, that’s not what you wanted to talk to me about, is it? You don’t have to care about any of the niceties of accusations and evidence and trials; you could just leave me in that cell with Max and Mike and Nancy. And you don’t care about the reasons for my beliefs, since you’re not going to change yours, and you know it. You want to know about Hawkins, because you want to make sure that your little occupation doesn’t get destroyed from nowhere.”  


“How very cynical of you, Mr Sinclair,” said Beeching, smiling a charming smile. “You are, at least, entirely correct to think that I’m currently acting as the executive commander for the Hawkins Security Garrison; in fact, I’ll probably be flying back there at some point soon to supervise how things are going on the ground. Honestly, you get in from one meeting with the President in Washington, and then there’s only a couple of hours until the next responsibility rears its ugly head. It’s relentless.”  


Lucas was not smiling. “You want to know what we’ve found out about the Upside-Down. About what might be coming through from the other side.”  


“Yes,” said Beeching, candidly. “If you have information on that, Mr Sinclair, then it would very much be for the good of the country if you were to tell me. But I don’t suppose that matters all that much to you, does it?”  


“You seem to think that the only way to care about the country is to support it wholeheartedly in every endeavour,” said Lucas. “To wave the flag for every invasion, to defend every atrocity carried out by its government. I prefer to show my patriotism by trying to make the country a good place for its citizens to live in.”  


“Well, if that’s your aim,” said Beeching, “then would you be inclined to tell me what you know about Hawkins?”  


“No,” said Lucas, without hesitating. “Because I know what will happen if I do. We won’t be any use to you from that point on.”  


Beeching chuckled amiably, and pressed a button on the tape recorder; its clicking and whirring, slowly, came to a halt. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, Mr Sinclair. You’re far more useful than you think. For one thing, this tape will be yet another thing for Sammy to try and explain; the President will be fascinated to know that one of Sammy’s old Hawkins proteges has discovered Marxism. Plus, there are people out there who will happily cooperate with us for as long as you and your friends are here in Ansted.”  


“Wow,” said Lucas. “So nice to feel wanted.”  


“Mr Sinclair,” said Beeching, standing, and motioning Lucas to do the same, “I promise you that I am not the sort of guy who hurts children. I know what you think about me. You think that I’m the bad guy, the evil overlord, the moustache-twirling villain. But I assure you, I have nothing but the best interests of the United States of America at heart, and I am doing my utmost to ensure that the principles of American democracy are not destroyed. If you care about America, Mr Sinclair, then we’re on the same team. And if you’re sure that I’m your enemy, perhaps you should think about what that means more broadly.”  


“I know what that means,” said Lucas, standing as well, and walking to the door. There was a soldier there, of course, his uniform neatly ironed and his black boots gleaming, ready to escort him back to the cell. “It means that I’m the enemy of someone who imprisons children. That seems like a good place to start.”  


But Beeching only chuckled, and waved him away.  


*******

Jim Hopper, for whatever it was worth any more, watched as the Mind Flayer pulled the car to a halt, and stepped out, taking his broken mind with it.  


They had not driven far from the hospital; perhaps five minutes, back into the centre of Winterton and up the slight hill on the northern edge, which had begun to cast a shadow over the town as the sun began to sink in the sky. Dotted throughout the town, as they drove, he had seen more figures standing utterly motionless, sometimes with other people talking to them and pleading with them and begging them to wake up, to just wake up.  


None of it mattered.  


There was a large vehicle in front of them, parked rather carelessly at what could generously be called the side of the road, and the moment that It stepped out of the car, a series of gunshots rang out, and this was evidently enough to set the memories off. Hopper did not particularly register the Mind Flayer’s calm walk towards the vehicle, or the sound of the bullets striking against the tarmac of the road; there was no fear, no concern, not even the worry that it would hurt to be hit by one. No, he welcomed it.  


For how could he not? None of it mattered.  


He had shot her. Well, the Mind Flayer had shot her, but it made absolutely no practical difference. Joyce had been shot, twice, and in all likelihood – and Hopper took a moment to silently, painfully, curse the fact that he knew the amount of time it took someone to die from an untreated bullet wound – was now probably dead. Joyce Byers, who had saved him and had saved the world in equal measure numerous times, was dead, lying on the steps of a hospital filled with corpses, just as one more anonymous corpse. When they found her body – if they found her body – they would not appreciate her importance.  


Back in Hell, back in the land of the dead, where he had been living for several months as the Mind Flayer slowly curled its tendrils around his identity (all the better to snap him in half), one of the ghosts had said something to him. Barbara Holland, perhaps, or the Hargrove kid, or someone; it wasn’t important. They had told him that letting people die was no different to actually killing them; and of course they had been saying that to torture him, but the whole point of the torture was that there had been no lies involved. And he had failed to stop the Mind Flayer when it had mattered; he had let Joyce die. And, therefore, he had killed her.  


None of it mattered.  


But by now, It had reached the vehicle, and Hopper reluctantly returned his focus to the world around him, faintly disappointed that the shooter inside it had not been a bit more accurate. It raised a hand – his hand, by some definitions, although not any more through the right of conquest – to the door at the side, as if to politely knock, and then It apparently decided that this was not an appropriate time for pleasantries, and simply tore the door from its hinges, and stepped calmly inside.  


There was a single man inside, pointing a pistol directly at the communal head of Hopper and the Mind Flayer, but he did not fire, his eyes widening with recognition, and Hopper recognised Murray Bauman at roughly the same point. But It did not care, taking the moment of hesitation as a good opportunity to knock the pistol from Murray’s hands and to pull him into a headlock, pushing him to the floor.  


“Jim?” said Murray, dazed, and Hopper vaguely wished that he could answer, but even if he had particularly wanted to try again at overthrowing the Mind Flayer’s control of his body, it had clearly not worked before, when the life of Joyce had been at stake, so he doubted that this would be particularly different.  


None of it mattered, after all.  


Murray fought, or tried. Hopper was impressed; considering the situation objectively, Murray had been thrown for no more than two seconds after realising which face lurked behind that unkempt beard, before he had decided that he was going to do whatever he would have done to any other assailant who did not look like a dead friend. In a lot of situations, that would probably have been sufficient, but this was not one of them.  


Eventually, It managed to secure him in place (for of course Murray had handcuffs and rope in the back of his conspiracy-theorist RV, thought a part of Hopper with no real surprise), and then It leaned back against the side of the vehicle, letting Murray shout and hiss questions at what he possibly still thought was Jim Hopper with a patient amusement, until Murray eventually fell silent.  


“Murray Bauman,” It said, with a tone of slight finality.  


Murray blinked, and then nodded.  


“Ah,” he said. “I see. Not Jim after all, then. The voice is different.”  


“You thought it might be him?” It said, sounding amused.  


Murray shrugged, as much as he was able to against the restraints holding him. “Didn’t want to rule out the possibility.”  


Hopper was not listening, not really. None of it mattered. Why should he care if the Mind Flayer was going to go through his friends and acquaintances one by one, killing them in turn? It had started too big, and none of the subsequent losses – except, perhaps, for one, but he categorically refused to even think about that – could possibly match up to the death of Joyce Byers.  


“The Mind Flayer,” said Murray, contemptuously. “Presumably. Occam’s Razor; nothing else I’ve heard of can reanimate the dead like this.”  


“The Mind Flayer?” It repeated, still amused. “That’s one name we’ve gone by, I suppose. But there are others as well. Entity Orpheus. The Shadow Monster. The Great Enemy. None of them have really got it right, you know.”  


Murray stared up at It, narrowing his eyes. “There’s a secret there?”  


“Oh,” It said, “a big one. The truth of Us is a fascinating one indeed.”  


Murray furrowed his eyebrows in concentration for a moment, and then scowled, and shook his head. “Who the fuck cares?”  


“Well,” It said, “that remains to be seen. But that isn’t why we’re here, Murray Bauman. That isn’t why we’ve dragged this decaying corpse across the worlds, to taunt you in your home.”  


“Oh?” said Murray.   


“No,” It said. “We are here for information. For all of the knowledge that you possess. Every last piece.”  


“Yeah,” said Murray. “Fuck you. That’s the most amount of knowledge you’re going to get out of me.”  


“Perhaps you should hear Us out, Murray Bauman,” It said. “Perhaps you should consider what we can do to you if you do not comply.”  


Murray only rolled his eyes, and again, Hopper was faintly impressed by the man’s fortitude. “I know what you can do to me. It won’t be clever or inventive; I’m not going to be impressed or anything. Pain and torture are boring; anyone can do them. I won’t be surprised.”  


“No,” said the Mind Flayer, quite starkly. “You will. But if you tell Us where they are, then we will ensure that your death is swift and relatively merciful. We will snap your neck and destroy your vehicle; the authorities, if they care, will not find a tortured, flayed carcass but an accident. That is the best that you can hope for from Us, and we will be all too happy to oblige if you give Us the information we seek.”  


“Wow,” said Murray, his voice dry. “Now that’s what I call a reward. A snapped neck. You should be running raffles instead of world domination, or whatever the fuck it is that you’re doing.”  


“Tell Us,” It repeated, ignoring him. “Tell Us where the girl is. Tell Us where the other children are. And tell Us everything you know about the powers of this world – for it is clear that you know – and then we shall give you oblivion.”  


“Once again,” said Murray, “fuck you. You think I’d help you try and destroy the world?”  


“The world will be destroyed whatever you do, Murray Bauman,” It said. “Your only choice now is how quickly you wish to depart from it.”  


“Oh, well, phrased like that,” said Murray, smiling with one half of his mouth, “I’m definitely not saying anything. I’d quite like to live as long a life as possible, if that’s all the same to you.”  


“It is in your interest to tell Us –“ the Mind Flayer began, the merest hint of anger beginning to creep into Its voice, but Murray cut it off.  


“You see,” he said, and Hopper did not know entirely how to react to this, because it was satisfying to see Murray completely and utterly refusing too be intimidated, but he knew on a deep and fundamental level that this could not end well for the man handcuffed before him, “you don’t know entirely what’s going on here, do you? In this town, in this world. You’re talking a pretty good game, but you’re clueless. You don’t know about the Vestige – of course you don’t, or you’d have used that against me in some way, brought it up by now – and you don’t know where anyone is or what they’re doing.”  


“Oh,” It said, “we know where Joyce Byers was. Before she died.”  


Murray blinked, and Hopper saw – just for a second – the same horror and blankness in his expression which would surely have been mirrored on his own face, had he been allowed to use it, but then it was gone.  


“Nah,” he said. “Nice try. I’m not buying it.”  


“We shot her,” said the Mind Flayer. “She is dead.”  


“That’s as maybe,” said Murray, “but you don’t know where El is, do you? Or Will? Or any of the rest of us, our little Starcourt Club, the ones who exploded your last body and closed the Gate and stopped you – you don’t know about them. And I’m not going to tell you. Because Joyce wouldn’t, and if what you’re saying is true, then Joyce didn’t. You can’t make me talk.”  


“But you do know the answers,” It said.  


“Oh, of course,” said Murray dismissively. “I’ve got a map of all of their locations in the glovebox. Go and get it if you like.”  


“You –“  


“No,” said Murray, staring into the eyes of the Mind Flayer, and Hopper’s as well. “Listen. I’ve been up here for two hours or so. There was a firebombing, and an army, and I knew that if I tried to find any of the children, to help them, then they’d follow me. I’m not stupid; I know that I can’t hide as well as the children can, and I knew what the Vestige wanted. I knew why they let me escape.”  


“What you’re saying is irrelevant,” It hissed.  


“Is it, though?” said Murray, smiling. “Let me finish. I escaped, because they let me, but I didn’t do what they wanted. Instead, I drove up here, up to the top of the largest hill I could find, and just sat here for a couple of hours. I didn’t run; I didn’t hide. Aren’t you a little curious why?”  


“Go on, then,” It said, and Hopper was curious as well, the curiosity penetrating the pain and grief ever so slightly, like rays of sunlight in a smoke-filled room. “Enlighten Us.”  


“Because I was thinking in the long term,” said Murray. “The Vestige wanted to spread. So do you, presumably. And if we lose this first battle – and god knows whether there’s anything I can do about that, but I suspect not – then we’re sure as hell going to win the war.”  


“And how do you propose to win a war against Us?” said the Mind Flayer.  


“It’s simple,” said Murray. “Scorched earth. That’s how.”  


A brief silence fell over the RV.  


“Look it up,” said Murray. “Barbarossa, maybe, or 1812; whichever you’d prefer. I’m making whatever you can manage to take into something more or less useless for your purposes.”  


It leaned forwards, towering over the man on the floor. “Continue.”  


“You, and the Vestige, and everything like you,” said Murray, “everything from your upside-down hellscape – you need secrets. You need the darkness, the confusion, the lack of clarity. Every single time you’ve tried before, you’ve been defeated the moment that we all got our collective shit together, compared notes, worked out what was actually happening. Solved the puzzles. Cracked the secrets.”  


“What do you mean by this?” hissed the Mind Flayer, and it was definitely angry now; Hopper could taste its rage, could feel its fury, pressing and stabbing into his identity where it still rested within his brain. Almost nonchalantly, it planted a kick into Murray’s ribs, but the sound of cracking bone and the gasp of pain did not seem to alleviate its anger, as far as Hopper could tell.  


“Only this,” said Murray, smiling defiantly through the pain. “Your plans always depend on a world that has no idea what’s coming for it. And they do now.”  


“What do you mean?” It repeated, kicking him again, and again, and striking him in the face with whatever objects came to hand – a mug, a book, the pistol – and Hopper wanted to look away, but his eyes were not his to avert.  


And Murray laughed, laughed like a man who had genuinely just heard the funniest joke of his life. “Do you want to know the best bit? _I’m still doing it._ I’m still transmitting.”  


“Transmitting what?” It shouted.  


“Everything,” said Murray, baring his teeth in a primal grin, as the blood ran down his face. “I have spent years collecting secrets and lies, coverups and scandals, the truth. And now it’s all going out, through the air. The truth about Watergate. The truth about Kennedy and King. The truth about MK Ultra and Operation Rembrandt, about Project Marigold and Operation Paperclip and the Silver Harp Plan and the Argus Network and the Contras. And, yes, the truth about you as well; about a world full of monsters and their incursions into the town of Hawkins, and about the king of the monsters, Entity Orpheus, the Great Enemy, the Mind Flayer. And everyone in this whole godforsaken country with a radio set can pick that up if they want, get all the truth they ever wanted, free at the point of service. And you can’t stop it. Nobody can stop it now.”  


“We can stop you,” It said, but Its voice was quieter now, and Hopper wondered if it was genuinely shaken by this knowledge, or whether its fury had just passed out of the range of human hearing. “We can stop you from functioning. And we will; we will make you suffer before death takes you.”  


“Brilliant,” said Murray, still smiling. “You do that. You make me suffer, take your time. Because every second that passes, you know, is another second that the radio signal from that little radio set in the back of the RV pulses out across the country. Across the world. And the longer you spend on torturing me, the more people are going to hear it. You can’t stop them from hearing it any more.”  


And finally, something snapped, and Hopper could feel the fury that was not his wash over him in waves and waves, cold and brittle and sharp and inescapable; and a sound of pure and unfettered rage burst loose from the Mind Flayer’s mouth, a yell of inhuman anger. And It grabbed Murray Bauman by the chest, stabbing Its fingers through his skin and lifting him up despite the handcuffs, which snapped his wrist shortly before they broke themselves, lifting him up to the level of Its eyes.  


And Hopper wanted to apologise, to thank him, to say something, but he could not. But he would not have been able to anyway, for Murray was laughing again, laughing into the face of the Mind Flayer, and he was still laughing when It grabbed his head and twisted, and broke his neck.  


Some time afterwards, in the silence of the RV, once It had destroyed everything that there was to be destroyed within the vehicle, Hopper felt Its thoughts settle into place again.  
And he realised that this was not a massive setback for It, not really. Murray had struck a blow against It – possibly quite a sizeable one – but It still had plans, plans far greater than anything that could be stopped by a single conspiracy theorist with a radio set.  


And Murray Bauman was dead now as well, another victim of the Mind Flayer. Another person that Jim Hopper had failed to save.  


None of it mattered, he remembered. They couldn’t tug on Superman’s cape, or any of the rest of it. They couldn’t really fight It.  


And, from the wreckage of the RV, Its hands darted down and picked up a folder, anonymous and brown, and opened it. On the first page, the words OPERATION ARGUS were printed in a bold and heavy typeface.  


And the Mind Flayer smiled.  


*******

In the darkness, a young woman sat and remembered.  


They did not allow her to have any lights after a particular time in the evening, not any more. All of the other privileges, too, had been stripped away, removed silently and implacably. Pleading would not have stopped her captors – in fact, it might well have made them more determined – and, in any case, she was not sure whether she possessed the strength, the energy, the bravery to try and fight for such small matters.  


But there was a world of difference between choosing not to make a stand on whether or not the lights were on, and giving up. She was not giving up; it was rather simple, really, when the possibility for making a choice had been eroded by the world around her, by her experiences, by the things she had learned. It turned out, sometimes, that the mere knowledge that there was a choice to be made instantly provided one with the answer. And, in this case, she had seen enough to know that there was no way that she could turn away from it.  


Jasna Konstanjević was still there.  


The journey back to Washington had been silent, almost. Once she had been loaded into the car as a prisoner, dragged away just as Nancy and the children had been dragged away, it had taken perhaps two minutes for her captors to go from the concerned and welcoming parents of a prodigal daughter, to captors once again.  


They had castigated her for her thoughtlessness, her irresponsibility. They had poured scorn on her reasons for leaving, her misplaced and misinformed idealism (or what they believed it to be, at least, for she had stopped trying to account for herself by that point). They had tried their hardest to make her feel as though she was lucky that they were taking her back, fortunate that they were prepared to forgive her for her transgressions; and once upon a time, that would have worked.  


But, for all their words, their barbs, their cutting and stifling reasons, they could not erase the feeling that still clung to Jasna’s lips. And – in a way that would have once seemed tremendously sentimental to Jasna had she read it in a book – that feeling, that memory of sensation, had provided her with an invisible shield of sorts against them.  


They had answered her charges, eventually, the ones that she had laid at their feet on the night she had left. She was wrong to have stolen her father’s keycard, they told her, and that could not be ignored. And overlooking that, Longbow House was a large place, full of government offices, and it was only natural that they should work there in a legal capacity, regardless of what else happened in that building. And, beyond that, even if they had worked on the things she had accused them of – MK Ultra, and its hundred siblings – this was not unethical, for it was all for the good of the nation, all for the greater cause of victory over communist tyranny. And, in any case, they had been ordered to work on this, and they could not have refused.  


Jasna had listened to these justifications, these excuses, and had thought to herself about Nuremberg. But she had not said anything, of course, because there was a slight difference between defiance and resistance, and she had chosen the latter.  


And then they had locked her in her room that evening, and taken her books away. She needed to be punished, her father had dispassionately informed her from the other side of the door. She needed to understand that there were consequences to her actions, and that if she could not be trusted not to run away again, then they would have to make sure that she remained in place long enough to learn her lesson.  


A day passed in silent captivity, at the normal rate of sixty minutes per hour. Jasna had realised, at around midday, that she had no idea which day it actually was – in Hawkins, when the soldiers had arrived, it had been a Monday morning, and that was what her parents had driven into, so perhaps it was Tuesday now. On the other hand, it had only been a matter of hours between meeting Robin in that diner on the Friday evening and the soldiers’ arrival, even if it had been a rather intense several hours – long enough to go to a haunted house and to watch it crumble; long enough to fail miserably at scaring away a monster and to listen to the poetry of William Butler Yeats; perhaps even long enough to fall in love, although that was a matter that required slightly more examination and research before Jasna could draw any conclusions on the matter. So perhaps it was Saturday, and the whole thing was still happening, somewhere.  


And now the night had fallen, and her light had been turned off. This was not actually particularly troubling, in a way, for all of her books had been confiscated; there was not a great deal that she would have done in the light that she could not do in the dark. So she sat there, and remembered, remembered everything.  


After a while, she stood, and she walked to the window, pulling the curtains open a small way. The city of Washington DC, or a facsimile of it made from glittering streetlamps and the lights of homes and offices stretched away into the night, and despite everything that the city meant to Jasna – despite the memories of a lonely childhood and a precarious adolescence, despite the tragedies that had happened here and the atrocities she had unearthed here, despite every bit of pain that the city of Washington had inflicted upon the blank slate of Jasna Konstanjević – it still, in its own way, possessed some kind of beauty.  


But she had seen the alternative now. She had sat in a forest in the middle of the night, far from the streetlights and office blocks. She had listened to the music of nighthawks in the cold winter air, and felt the half-frosted ground beneath her feet. She had discovered people who would defend her, people who would house her, people who would be kind to her. She had found a better place to be than this city.  


And, of course, she had discovered Robin, and with her, a new part of herself that seemed in retrospect to have been there all along. And that had been quite terrifying, but in a thrilling sort of way, and one that she would not have exchanged for a hundred years of safety and quiet desperation in this place.  


She looked out into the night again. There were terrible things out there, of course. Down in the town where Jonathan and his family lived, there was something creeping and spreading and building. In the forests of Hawkins, when Robin Buckley was not walking through them with a bright halo of light around her, there was a monster, prowling the darkness, waiting to pick off the unguarded and unprotected. Once upon a time there had been ghosts in Hawkins as well, and maybe they would come back.  


And then there were soldiers, breaking down the doors of classrooms and dragging children away with them. There were scientists who experimented on children, hidden away in their laboratory-castles. There were generals and princes and presidents, the governors of this whole country, making their plans and plotting against one another, playing a game that would never end as long as there was a gameboard to play it on.  


There was suffering. There were monsters. The world was more full of weeping than she could understand.  


But there were things to protect as well, and causes to fight for. And she had seen them now, seen what really mattered. She could never have gone back after seeing that; that moment in Longbow House, all those weeks ago, had clarified matters. All of the grand abstract questions of philosophy and theology that she had once enjoyed reading about had melted away in the face of concrete reality, and given her a cause which would never leave her.  


Stop the weeping. Wherever she could, however she could. That was really all that mattered.  


And she would not let anything come between her and this cause. Small details – like the fact that she was in a locked room in a tall apartment block, or that the only people who had ever seemed to have had a plan in this whole strange story had been taken away to Ansted by the kings and princes, or the sure and certain knowledge that the world was a terrible place – were ultimately only obstacles to be considered and dealt with, however she could.  


The window, it turned out, could be broken with one of the legs of her metal bedframe, which she was able to unscrew with her fingernails. The thirty-foot drop beneath it could be mostly navigated with bedsheets and clothes, tied together, and subsequently with a panicky fall at the end onto snow-covered grass. The cold of the Washington winter could be kept at least vaguely at bay by the clothes she had managed to bring with her.  


And when she had escaped, she looked up at the unlit window, at the place where they had tried to imprison her, and wondered to herself if she should have left a note or a letter, but then decided that she was right not to have done so. She had no further need to justify herself to them.  


And so Jasna Konstanjević – shivering with cold, crying with hope, utterly devoid of any sort of plan as to what she was going to do next – walked away, into the snowy night, to go and try to save the world, and more importantly, to help her friends.  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. Welcome back, everyone...
> 
> I'm so sorry about the length of that hiatus there - it was a bit longer than I'd exactly anticipated, but I hope that this chapter was worth it! I've found it a bit difficult to entirely keep up the pace that I was writing at during Part Two (partially because work has been rather intense, and partially because Part Three took a bit of a while to plan out, but also because I'm currently living with my girlfriend (having been stranded at hers due to lockdown, which is very much the least bad consequence of the pandemic so far...), and feel that it would be somewhat antisocial to be typing late into the night every single night, as I was doing last term; and, indeed, partially because Chapter 14 was written in a sort of weird frenzy) - but, to be clear, I'm definitely not stopping this whole thing. Chapters may take a bit longer than they were doing before (which, honestly, is probably good for my sanity and their quality), but they'll be coming eventually - and hopefully we'll still be finishing before the real Season 4 comes out...
> 
> Once again - and, blimey, it feels good to be saying this again! - thank you, thank you a thousand times over, to everyone who has commented on, given kudos to, or even just read this story! When I started writing it, I had no idea how long it would actually turn out to be, but also what an amazing response it would garner from everyone - knowing that there are people reading this has genuinely been one of the best things about 2020-21 for me so far, and I really hope that you all enjoy this chapter, as the end begins... As per usual, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on it - whether it be feedback, criticism, questions, theories, thematic analysis, or just jokes about the bewildering plot, everything is welcome, and I am always absolutely and utterly delighted to see people engaging with this story!
> 
> As for the next chapter - there's a possibility that I might be able to finish it by the end of February, but early March is probably a bit more realistic. (Fortunately, at the very least, PhD proposals are all done now, as are two of my three pieces of coursework and...about 10% of my dissertation, if I'm being entirely honest with myself here.)
> 
> Coming soon, then - Chapter 16: No More Heroes...


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